Mobile Performance Advertising Startup Moloco Secures $11 Million in Series B Funding

Moloco, the mobile advertising Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company, today announced it has secured $11 million in Series B funding. The round is being led by Samsung Ventures and Draper Athena, with participation from Mirae Asset Management, Smilegate Investment and KTB Ventures. Moloco turns user data into ad performance, enabling mobile businesses to execute marketing and advertising monetization programs in-house with no upfront cost and to achieve short time to market. Investment proceeds will be used by the company to advance development of the firm's proprietary Ad Cloud platform and related solutions, as well as to support expansion of sales and marketing initiatives.

Moloco powers a healthy mobile ecosystem by delivering every component needed to run an effective mobile advertising business. At the heart of Moloco's platform is the company's battle-tested predictive ad performance engine, powered by machine learning. The Moloco performance engine enables publishers to transform data into advertising performance and, ultimately, revenue. With Moloco, app publishers have a unique platform capable of monetizing both marketing and advertising programs within the same solution. A machine learning algorithm optimizes delivery and performance across different ad creative types, while proprietary fraud tools protect ad spending.

"Our vision is to drive a healthy mobile ecosystem by providing mobile app developers and publishers with a turn-key advertising infrastructure that empowers them to run their own advertising business," commented Ikkjin Ahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Moloco. "Our platform helps users see more relevant ads while reducing fraud and providing advertisers with greater choice and better performance."

The comprehensive Moloco platform offers solutions for large-scale mobile platforms, app publishers and ad networks and includes:

• User Acquisition Tools - to unlock new user growth through Performance Advertising, including fully programmatic and transparent ad bidding that is integrated with real-time bidding (RTB) exchanges, as well as Lookalike Audiences Targeting, for locating and targeting the most valuable potential new users.


• User Re-Engagement Tools - to generate greater customer lifetime value (LTV) via advertising that brings back users; includes targeted campaigns for inactive users, programs to convert free users to paid, and solutions that drive loyalty. Dynamic Segmentation of user lists saves time, while Product Feed Retargeting reaches out to customers who have abandoned their shopping carts with dynamic and highly relevant ad creative.


• DoubleCheck Fraud Analysis - to reduce fraud and protect ad spending, Moloco offers a proprietary DoubleCheck Score that delivers comprehensive analysis of fraud and app install quality. DoubleCheck can isolate fraud at the Ad Network level, offering a potential marketing budget savings of more than 80 percent via fraud prevention and remediation, as well as an increase in expected real user growth of more than 24 percent through more effective budget assignment.

Ad Cloud is built on a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure, and Moloco's comprehensive suite of tools is available as on-demand service offerings. Moloco readily integrates with popular industry solutions, including Google AdX and Twitter Mopub, and has the performance to handle more than 550,000 bid request queries per second, as well as to dynamically price and purchase ad space on popular exchanges within just 100 milliseconds.

According to Samsung, "Moloco's state-of-the-art machine learning performance engine and cloud-based ad infrastructure are what mobile platforms have been looking for. We are excited about the opportunity to back a strong team with solid technology."

"Moloco is set to disrupt the mobile ecosystem," said Perry Ha, Draper Athena Managing Director.  "Just as AWS enabled tech companies to easily scale their infrastructure, Moloco's Ad Cloud will empower mobile apps to scale their ad monetization by providing a powerful performance-based mobile ad Infrastructure-as-a-Service."

Seasoned Ad Industry Executives and Top-Tier Customers

Moloco is led by an executive team with deep experience in mobile and online advertising infrastructure, as well as machine learning. Co-Founder and CEO Ikkjin Ahn previously served as YouTube's first monetization machine learning engineer and was the Big Data team lead for Android. The company's core team includes former Google engineering talents who are experienced in ad-centric machine learning as well as in building mobile ad infrastructure solutions.

About Moloco

Privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Moloco was founded in 2013 with a vision to empower mobile businesses to thrive. Moloco is ranked highly in TUNE Inc.'s conversion rate chart, as well as AppsFlyer's Performance Index for 2018. The company is heavily tech-driven and employs top technical talent from Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Goldman Sachs. Partners include AdColony, Adjust, AppLovin, AppsFlyer, Branch, DoubleClick, Kochava, Mopub, Rubicon, Singular, Smaato and TUNE Inc. To learn more, visit www.molocoads.com.

Industry Announcements's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net