Advanced Television

Beeswax raises $15m in Series B funding

January 23, 2019

Beeswax, the extensible programmatic buying platform, has secured $15 million (€13.2bn) in Series B Funding led by RRE, Foundry, and Amasia along with participation from You & Mr Jones. Having raised $28 million to date, Beeswax says its continued growth across North America, Europe, and APAC is fueled by the company’s alignment with major industry shifts including the rise of Connected TV and surge of brands in-housing their programmatic strategies.

“Beeswax’s mainline proposition as a Bidder-as-a-Service, in addition to stellar leadership, puts them in an incredibly attractive light. For an industry that spent the past few years demanding more transparency from the advertising ecosystem, the emergence of a SaaS technology built to meet those demands head-on is not only a rarity but a major point of progress,” said Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry Group. “Bringing this differentiator to Connected TV capabilities only strengthens their position.”

Expected to grow to two-thirds of global digital media spend this year, programmatic is increasingly becoming the mainstream method for transacting digital media. With a diverse set of media and marketer customers including Twitch, FourSquare, Cognitiv, Social Point, Dailymotion, Tresensa, and Iotec, Beeswax enables businesses to transform their programmatic strategies into scalable revenue channels.

“With Beeswax’s Bidder-as-a-Service technology, Twitch enables advertisers to reach its highly-engaged customer based across and outside of the Twitch network,” said Brian Christmas, Director, Advanced Media Services at Twitch. “The flexible infrastructure provided by the Beeswax platform allows us to deliver custom, high-quality, dynamic ad units, further nurturing the already loyal Twitch customer base and driving our business.”

Beeswax’s growing customer pool ranges from media companies, like Twitch, integrating the BaaS technology into their advertising stack, to brands looking to market their product, like gaming company Social Point, who can deploy custom bidding algorithms to match their specific ROI needs.

“Since bringing our programmatic strategy in-house through Beeswax’s Bidder-as-a-Service technology, we’ve been able to double down on our mission of connecting the world via gameplay while driving our business’ bottom line far more effectively,” says Sharon Biggar, Chief Marketing Officer at Social Point. “The flexibility of the Beeswax platform, allowing us to choose our own supply and bring our own custom optimization algorithms to the table, coupled with their flat pricing structure has enabled us to maximize the ROI of our advertising.”

“Brands shouldn’t look at the upward trend of programmatic and do nothing. Ultimately, success in programmatic leads to success in the market,” said Ari Paparo, CEO of Beeswax. “When marketers make programmatic a core competency in the stack, they begin to recognise a scalable revenue channel that can compete, at the highest level, with Google and Facebook.”

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