Smaato Raises US$ 25 Million to continue investment in its Global Mobile RTB ad-exchange and SSP Platform

Hamburg, Germany / Singapore – August 05, 2014 – Smaato, the leading global mobile Real-Time Bidding (RTB) ad exchange (SMX) and Supply Side Platform (SSP), today announced US$ 25 million in Series E funding. Asia's leading media organization, Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (SPH), participated in the round along with Aeris CAPITAL, EDBI and other existing shareholders. Smaato will use the new funds to fuel growth, operations and development of its next-generation platform focused on self-serve automation.

Smaato owns and operates the leading global mobile RTB ad exchange and SSP. Smaato’s Publisher platform (SPP) and SMX Real-time bidding ad-exchange has rapidly grown its global footprint since January 2011 (Smaato’s last funding period), with 11,686 publishers at the time, to now 78,000 publishers who are able to monetize their inventory across 270+ Ad Networks and Demand Side Platforms. SMX serves 90 billion+ ad impressions per month to 450M+ unique visitors in US, EMEA and APAC regions.

“Approximately 65 percent of our publishers want to monetize mobile apps and the rest is mobile web sites,” said Ragnar Kruse, CEO and co-founder of Smaato. “With roughly 466% year-to-year growth in programmatic in-app advertising spend, mobile app developers want to have full control of their inventory and data in a self-serve model. As such, we will use this new funding to build out our next-generation SPP platform that will allow for these controls and automation of monetization on scale across more than 270+ demand sources.”

Singapore Press Holdings is the largest media company in Singapore listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange with revenues of US$ 991m (S$ 1,239m) in 2013. SPH publishes 19 newspaper titles and over 100 magazine titles. Beyond print, SPH's suite of digital products includes online editions of newspapers and magazines, as well as mobile applications, online classifieds, financial portals, and other digital investments. The new funds from the investors come at a time when there is large demand from global brands for access to regional publisher inventory through programmatic (RTB), which involves online or mobile advertising inventory being bought and sold programmatically through instantaneous auctions. This aligns with Smaato’s plan of launching private exchanges controlled by top publishers in APAC looking for automated methods to run premium advertising campaigns.

Smaato currently has 117 employees and is rapidly growing, with 20 open jobs in its offices in San Francisco, New York, Hamburg, Singapore and Jakarta.