Photo Credit: Tru Optik
Tru Optik, a Stamford, Connecticut-based leader in the over-the-top (OTT) targeting, measurement, and privacy management announced it has raised $10 million in funding led by Mithera Capital. TransUnion, Connecticut Innovations, Arab Angel Fund, and Progress Ventures also participated in this funding round.
Year-over-year, Tru Optik saw 11x growth in its SaaS/DaaS business. And Tru Optik is poised to take advantage of the OTT ad revenue market expecting to exceed $20 billion in the U.S. alone by 2020.
What does Tru Optik do? It empowers agencies, direct advertisers, publishers, and ad tech platforms to execute precision-targeted OTT campaigns at scale by activating any of thousands of third-party audience segments or first-party data against Tru Optik’s privacy-compliant household graph.
With this funding round, Tru Optik is going to increase its sales and marketing activity and accelerate international growth. Plus Tru Optik is going to expand its proprietary OTT Household Graph — which comprises of more than 80 million households. And Tru Optik is going to extend its capabilities across other forms of addressable advertising like streaming audio.
“Tru Optik’s technology anonymously maps every OTT screen across 80MM U.S. homes, enabling advertisers to reach more than 90 percent of ad-supported OTT viewers. The audience reach and targeting precision we offer is unmatched in the OTT ad ecosystem, which is why more than 10,000 brands and advertisers rely on Tru Optik to drive their audience-based capabilities to build their ad-supported CTV offerings,” said Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston in a statement. “This investment will allow us to better capitalize on our lead in this space and pull further ahead as we bring our suite of services to a global customer base.”
Tru Optik recently partnered with Oracle to make Oracle Data Cloud segments available for targeting across OTT/CTV for the first time. And Tru Optik also provides unique census-level cross-device measurement and audience validation solutions for OTT ad campaigns.
“Tru Optik is the engine that drives advanced audience targeting and granular/actionable measurement for OTT advertising,” added Mithera Capital COO and Managing Director Mark Feldman. “Massive growth of OTT advertising is inevitable, and we are especially excited to get behind Tru Optik because they occupy a unique position in the future of television.”
TransUnion EVP of Digital Marketing Solutions and Head of Media Vertical Matt Spiegel explained that OTT is already a mainstream viewing option globally. But brands and media companies need advanced one-to-one targeting capabilities and census-level measurement that Tru Optik provides in order to reach the potential of OTT advertising.
Free on-demand live channels platform XUMO partnered with Tru Optik to provide more value to advertisers in order to reach thousands of different consumer segments and measure and validate audiences accurately in real-time.
“As the destination for free live and on-demand streaming entertainment, it only makes sense that we would leverage a DMP built specifically for OTT and Connected TV,” XUMO CEO Colin Petrie-Norris commented.
Videology — which is now a part of Amobee — is the first video ad technology to integrate with Tru Optik over two years ago. Amobee’s SVP of Client and Data Strategy Aleck Schleider pointed out that Videology is continuing to advance its converged video solutions so brands can more accurately reach their desired audiences across TV & Connected TV more holistically.
“Tru Optik is an important partner in our ability to work with first and third-party data for targeting across Connected TV supply, which is today’s fastest growing channel in the video eco-system,” Schleider noted.
Tru Optik is the preferred partner for many of the world’s largest media companies, brands, and agencies. And the company is the founding member of OptOut.TV — which is a consortium of OTT publishers, ad tech companies, and data providers dedicated to providing consumers clear and effective privacy options in the connected TV ad space.
