LONDON, ENGLAND, Social ad platform used by the largest mobile advertisers in the world, today announced that it has raised $7M in Series A funding.
Glow Digital Media (
www.thisisglow.com), the social ad platform used by the largest mobile advertisers in the world, today announced that it has raised $7m in Series A funding from Notion Capital and White Star Capital, two of Europe's leading venture capital firms. Existing investors Project A Ventures and Avonmore Developments also participated in the round.
The new funding will be used for further international expansion and continued product development of the Glow Platform. The Glow Platform uses both proprietary and social data to help brands find, engage and transact with their most relevant and profitable customers on Facebook and Twitter. Available as a fully featured social ads tool, the Glow Platform enables marketers to deeply integrate their existing systems with Glow's technology thereby tailoring their experience to better meet their specific needs.
With the Glow Platform, large advertisers and agencies can benefit from the best-in-class social ads platform for performance and mobile, but with the efficiency of having their customer data, product feeds and other third party or proprietary systems integrated into their social advertising and the ability to identify and target users across social platforms.
Some of the leading direct response marketers already benefit from the capabilities of the Glow Platform including King, US Bank and Spotify:
'The last 12 months have been an amazing journey for us, we helped customers integrate deeply with the Glow Platform, expanded across the globe, adding operations in New York and Singapore, and built a team of experts that helped drive year on year sales growth of 500%,' said Damian Routley, co-founder and CEO of Glow.
'We are thrilled to have the combination of Notion and White Star joining us, they bring a depth of knowledge and real life experience that is second to none. The team at Notion founded and scaled MessageLabs and exited for $700m, and Christian Hernandez at White Star, helped incubate Google's international mobile efforts and scaled out Facebook's business across EMEA ' I couldn't think of two better placed partners to have round the table. I am incredibly excited about what the future will bring for Glow and its customers.'
'Glow is already achieving measurable ROI for an impressive list of global advertisers,' said Ian Milbourn, Partner at Notion Capital. 'Generating results across Twitter and Facebook in an integrated, customizable and efficient way is a marketer's dream and exactly what Glow delivers. We look forward to supporting Glow's growth and exciting future.'
'Our commitment to support Glow comes after a lengthy process of evaluating the leading and emerging players in the social ad tech space,' said Christian Hernandez, Managing Partner at White Star Capital. 'We believe that Glow's ambition and vision, combined with their product and commercial strategy and the advice from the investors around the table, will send a very strong signal to the market that they are the team to back.'
Florian Heinemann, early investor and Managing Partner at Project A commented, 'Given the strong performance of the team during the last two years that we have been involved, we are more than happy to continue our support for Glow in this round. We believe that Glow is very well positioned in one of the most dynamic and promising spaces within advertising technology.'
Glow opened their regional hub for APAC in Singapore, hiring Facebook's APAC Head of Gaming in June 2014, and, earlier this month, Glow was named as one of four new Marketing Platform Partners to help Twitter roll out their new mobile app promotion ad format. This round brings total financing to $8m to date.
For more information on Glow and their Glow Platform, visit
www.thisisglow.com.
About Glow Digital Media
Available as a fully featured social ads tool, the Glow Platform helps brands find, engage and transact with the most relevant and profitable customers on Facebook and Twitter. Glow is one of Facebook's fourteen Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers (SPMD), and one of eleven Twitter Marketing Platform Partners with access to their recently launched Mobile App Promotion tools. Glow provides amazing value and first class service to clients across the globe through their hubs in London, New York and Singapore.
About Notion Capital
Notion Capital is an entrepreneur-backed venture capital firm focused on high potential businesses in the Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) markets. The Notion partners have unique expertise and experience in the Cloud Computing market having founded, built and exited two highly successful businesses in the space ' Star and MessageLabs. Companies within Notion's portfolio include AdBrain, Brightpearl, Duedil, Idio, NewVoiceMedia, Shopa, The Currency Cloud and Tradeshift. Learn more at http://www.notioncapital.com.
About White Star Capital
White Star Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that helps exceptional entrepreneurs build great technology companies. With a presence in Europe and North America and a truly global network, White Star Capital invests in talented teams and supports them to scale globally. Our team has over 80 years of operational experience having been a part of 5 IPOs, 4 acquisitions and over 100 M&A transactions. Current and exited White Star portfolio companies include Betaworks and KeyMe in New York, Dollar Shave Club and Science in Los Angeles, Ludia in Montreal, Summmly and Glow in London. More on White Star Capital at www.whitestarvc.com.
About Project A Ventures
Project A Ventures is a company builder focusing on Internet, Advertising Technology and Mobile. With our experts' operational know-how and our financial support, we help start-ups to build up competences in key areas such as IT, Performance Marketing, Business Intelligence and Organization Building, and thus contribute to their sustainable success. Our experts, based in Berlin and Sao Paulo, are among the best in their field and have been involved in building more than 50 market leading companies worldwide within the last 15 years. More about Project A Ventures: www.project-a.com