- Brian O’Kelley — the co-founder and former CEO of AppNexus — has turned his attention to the commodities market, which is ripe for disruption
In an interview with AdExchanger, AppNexus co-founder and former CEO Brian O’Kelley revealed he is now focused on the commodities market with a new startup called CMDTY (pronounced “commodity”). For CMDTY, O’Kelly will be applying data and technology to the supply chain and logistics management industry — which is ripe for disruption.
O’Kelley has partnered with co-founder Andrea Aranguren (Palacios) — who previously worked as a Vice President of Environmental Markets at IHS Markit and a former Vice President of Metal Logistics at Goldman Sachs.
AppNexus is known for helping the largest advertisers and digital publishers take advantage of real-time bidding. This drastically changed the way that ads were bought and sold.
O’Kelley sold AppNexus to AT&T for $1.6 billion last year. And before that, he worked as the CTO of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo for $680 million) between 2003-2007. O’Kelley was originally planning to bootstrap CMDTY with his own funds, but several investors quickly offered $10 million to get in at the early stage including Venrock and Rucker Park.
O’Kelley also told AdExchanger that the commodities market and the ad industry has a similar set of challenges. And there were a lot of ideas applied to the advertising market that could also be applied to logistics.
“Ready to move on from advertising and digital media, I started to look for a market with similar scale, complexity, and impact where a diverse, global, values-driven team could make a transformative impact. I found physical commodities: a $4 trillion industry that provides the raw materials for the global economy and has not yet been disrupted by technology,” said O’Kelley in a blog post. “Similar to advertising, physical commodities has a complex supply chain, deep entanglement with public policy, and structural inefficiencies that harm producers and consumers alike. Supply chain and logistics technologies are starting to fundamentally change the way that commodities are traded and transported, with significant potential for disruption due to autonomous vehicles, environmental policies, and changes to the global trade landscape.”
Initially, CMDTY will be building an operating system for helping commodity trading companies manage logistics. This will address the issue where many traders still use physical pieces of paper, whiteboards, and spreadsheets for tracking the movements of commodities. The CMDTY founders are planning to hire a team of around 10 people and keep operations lean during this phase.
Featured image credit: Brian O’Kelley
