clypd, the television industry's leading sell-side technology provider, today announced that it has secured $19.4 million in a Series B round of financing led by global media company RTL Group, with additional participation from Atlas Venture, Data Point Capital, Duke University, TiVo Inc., Transmedia Capital and Western Technology Investment. With approximately $30 million in financing to date, clypd's latest round of funding will accelerate growth of the company's industry-leading platform to help TV media owners in the adoption of programmatic TV.
The Series B funding will be used to expand resources across all departments at clypd, including product development, data science, business development, engineering and marketing. This will help create new technologies to support enterprise-wide sales solutions for television media owners. The capital will also be used to expand the business into new markets, including Europe and APAC.
'clypd is one of the first companies to create a strong platform for programmatic sales for linear TV in the U.S. It offers a unique set of tools to the market at a crucial time, when programmatic video sales are growing rapidly,' said Rhys Noelke, Vice President Business Development at RTL Group. 'clypd adds key TV sales competencies that will offer groundbreaking solutions for TV advertisers. We see great potential in the company -- in both the U.S. and Europe.'
Founded in 2012 and built exclusively for the television industry, clypd has helped TV media owners realize the full potential of their inventory with an end-to-end solution to manage their sales efforts. The company has rapidly gained favor with TV media owners; key clients include Cox, Discovery, Univision, and others.
'clypd is moving the industry forward by enabling data-driven TV ad sales and delivering actionable insights. We are at a turning point in advertising and clypd has the potential to help TV media owners understand their inventory and audiences in a way never done before,' said TiVo's Chief Research Officer Jonathan Steuer. 'TiVo's strategic investment in clypd represents the incredible potential we see in their platform.'
'The television advertising industry continues to adopt programmatic strategies that move the industry forward, making TV advertising more targeted and efficient. clypd is laser-focused on helping television media owners and distributors navigate this changing landscape while enhancing the value of their inventory,' said Joshua Summers, CEO and Co-Founder of clypd. 'We are grateful and excited to have a stellar group of investors backing the company as we continue to develop our groundbreaking TV sales platform. RTL Group's global footprint will certainly help accelerate our efforts to deliver on the promise of programmatic TV.'
Television advertising stands as the largest existing advertising channel, with a $74 US/$220 billion global market. As new advertising strategies are adopted across the industry, programmatic TV promises to be one of the fastest growing advertising segments in the industry.
About RTL Group
RTL Group is the leading European entertainment network, with interests in 52 television channels and 29 radio stations and content production throughout the world. The television portfolio of Europe's largest broadcaster includes RTL Television in Germany, M6 in France, the RTL channels in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Croatia, Hungary and Antena 3 in Spain. The Group also operates the channels RTL CBS Entertainment HD and RTL CBS Extreme HD in Southeast Asia. RTL Group's families of TV channels are either the number one or number two in eight European countries. The Group's flagship radio station is RTL in France, and it also owns or has interests in other stations in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Luxembourg. RTL Group's content production arm, FremantleMedia, is one of the largest international creators, producers and distributors of multi-genre content outside the US. With operations in 28 countries, FremantleMedia's comprehensive global network is responsible for more than 10,000 hours of programming a year and distributes over 20,000 hours of content worldwide. Combining the catch-up TV services of its broadcasters, the multi-channel networks BroadbandTV and StyleHaul as well as FremantleMedia's more than 210 Youtube channels, RTL Group has become the leading European media company in online video. RTL Group also owns a majority stake in the programmatic video advertising platform SpotXchange. For more information, please visit RTLGroup.com and follow RTL Group on Twitter @rtlgroup.
About TiVo
TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO) is a global leader in next-generation television services. With global headquarters in San Jose, CA and offices in New York, NY, Boston, MA and Durham, NC, TiVo's innovative cloud-based Software-as-a-Service solutions enable viewers to consume content across all screens in and out-of-the home. The TiVo solution provides an all-in-one approach for navigating the 'content chaos' by seamlessly combining live, recorded, on-demand, and over-the-top television into one intuitive user interface. The TiVo experience provides TV viewers with simple universal search, discovery, viewing and recording from an array of devices, creating the ultimate viewing experience. TiVo products and services are available at retail or through a growing number of pay-TV operators world-wide. TiVo's multiple subsidiary companies provide the broader television industry and consumer electronics manufacturers with cloud-based video discovery and recommendation options, interactive advertising solutions, and audience research and measurement services. More information at: www.TiVo.com.
About clypd
clypd is the advertising technology platform built exclusively for the television industry, empowering media owners with programmatic ad solutions. Founded in 2012, the company's TV sales platform delivers workflow automation, data-enhanced decisioning and provides media partners with tools to manage their sales efforts. clypd's innovations around programmatic television are opening doors for incremental digital budgets currently not available to the TV media owners. The clypd team is comprised of both TV and digital advertising experts, which uniquely positions the company to understand and meet the needs of the television industry while leveraging the best programmatic strategies from the digital world. For more information, please visit www.clypd.com.