Topsort announced that it raised $20 million in Series A funding. The funding round was led by Upload Ventures and returning seed round investors Quiet Capital and Pear Ventures. And the Series A round values the company at $150 million.
Topsort will utilize the funding round to scale its clean advertising platform, which is free of creepy third-party cookie tracking and privacy-invasive data. This is a significant departure from the advertising world of yesterday and a leap towards democratizing the same auction-based advertising that garnered massive profits for giants like Google and Amazon.
With the industry closing the chapter on third-party cookies, Topsort’s platform works as the connective tissue for the post-cookie world of ads that do not work around the privacy issue but solve it entirely for enterprise-level customers.
The Topsort platform is driven by similar AI and ML models that power platforms in the 2020s AI revolution. As a large prediction machine, Topsort works with a self-learning algorithm, using human feedback to maintain a constant state of improvement. Unlike copycat ad tech companies, Topsort:
1.) Empowers retailers/marketplaces – Through a retail media platform and customizable APIs, Topsort enables retailers and marketplaces to run effective ad campaigns with high returns.
- 2.) Provides a clean replacement for cookies – The commerce and media-focused, easy-to-use clean room is one-of-a-kind, encrypted technology with zero visibility into privacy data – not even Topsort can see it.
- 3.) Offers transparency to retail Media buying – Topsort provides 1-click sponsored listings across onsite searches with total return on advertising spend (ROAS) control. And this enables retailers and brands to uncover valuable insights while respecting privacy with compliant, anonymous data matching.
Launched in 2021, Topsort is led by CEO and co-founder Regina Ye, who is a former beauty brand seller turned advertising disruptor, CTO and co-founder Francisco Larrain, a serial entrepreneur who had two exits, including one from Groupon and led its engineering in its heyday, and co-founder and Chief Scientist, Michael Ostrovsky, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a world-renowned economist on auction theory, game theory, and marketplace design.
Since its founding a few years ago, Topsort has earned the trust of major retailers, marketplaces, and brands, including Poshmark, Cencosud, Unilever, Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, General Mills, Glovo (part of Delivery Hero), Phillips, and many more. The company previously raised $8.6 million in a seed round in 2022.
KEY QUOTE:
“This funding round is further fueling our mission to accelerate the clean advertising revolution using AI and new age machine learning technology. Only one part of what’s to come is the democratization of auction-based advertising technology into Bidless formats, which previously had a much higher bar of entry and amassed an insane amount of profit for some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. With Topsort, we hope to democratize the access to KPI-driven, efficient and transparent media in the new age of post-cookies to both enterprise retailers, top brands and agencies, as well as small, long-tail sellers alike. Advertisers of all shapes and sizes can benefit from a highly profitable ad business that works for everyone within the ecosystem.”
– Topsort CEO and co-founder Regina Ye
