Simplifying Performance Marketing – Invests in Integrate
At the very end of last year we announced an investment in Integrate – a performance advertising platform company. Seth posted about it on his blog at the time and we meant to repost it here at FoundryGroup.com as well. Here it is:
Performance marketing has been both a very lucrative side of internet advertising but also a bit of the wild west, where rules are made to be stretched or broken (with alarming regularity). And while the simplicity of pay for performance has been attractive to many advertisers, diligence has been required to monitor the quality of the traffic and leads generated by performance marketers. In particular, control of creative assets and their appropriate use has been a concern for many advertisers that is why many businesses opt to hire a SEO agency to bring traffic to their websites. In addition, existing performance marketing platforms have been limited solely to online assets.
Enter Integrate – a platform that simplifies the execution of performance marketing campaigns and allows advertisers unprecedented control over their campaigns. Integrate places transparency into the marketplace for both publishers and buyers, allowing both to review one another’s business data before making an informed decision to work together. In addition, algorithms are built into Integrate to monitor deceitful practices that have previously plagued the industry. The Integrate platform provides legitimacy and basic regulation to an industry that has seriously lacked it. As a result, since its inception earlier this year, Integrate has attracted some of the largest internet performance advertisers as well as a number of well known retailers and brands who had not previously been significant buyers of performance based leads.
Today we’re announcing a $4.25M financing for the company that we believe will push its growth trajectory even higher. It joins a handful of adtech related investments in the Foundry portfolio (coming soon: my Foundry Unified Theory of AdTech Investing) that together are enabling online advertisers to better target specific users (AdMeld and Triggit), more effectively place media (Integrate and Trada) and access new publishers (Lijit) and media (Medialets).
Integrate was founded by Hart Cunningham and Jeremy Bloom, with whom I’ve had the fortune to work with over the last 5 months as this investment came together. These guys eat, breathe and sleep (literally – I think they have a cot in the office) performance marketing. I have a deep appreciation for passionate entrepreneurs and Jeremy and Hart fit this mold to a tee.
We’re looking forward to telling you more about Integrate as we continue to build and enhance the platform and add more and more advertisers and publishers to the Integrate platform.
As we reflect back on 2010 it is fun to remember the new companies we invested in during the year. We ended up making investments in 11 new companies this year – eight in our 2007 fund and three in our new fund which we announced in October.
When we look back and see when the investments were made, our timing is very lumpy. We’ve always been this way – we don’t have a particular pacing, tempo, partner allocation, or thematic allocation goal – we just all work on everything together and invest when we get really excited about something.
Following are the investments we made in 2010 by month.
These investments cover a wide range of geography (Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland) and touch on most of our themes (Protocol, Distribution, HCI, Glue, and Adhesive). We’ve got a good range of first time entrepreneurs, new relationships for us, and folks we’ve worked with in the past in the mix.
We believe 2011 will be an incredible year for software and Internet innovation, company creation, and entrepreneurial impact and we are psyched to be a part of it.
Gluecon and Alcatel-Lucent team – changing the game at Gluecon 2011
Our goal for Gluecon has always been to make it *the* gathering place for developers working on the connective technologies that hold the web and IT infrastructure together – from web services to SOA to APIs and cloud computing. Eric Norlin – our partner in Gluecon, Defrag and now Blur – has helped bring together technology leaders for an in depth (and proudly geeky) conversation around the changing landscape of these technologies and the applications they support.
As we move towards our third year running Gluecon we’re extremely pleased to announce a hugely important sponsorship with Alcatel-Lucent. ALU will become the Community Underwriter for the conference. This partnership will really change the face of Glue and open up even more opportunities for companies to participate. For starters, ALU is underwriting the ability for 15 companies to demo at Glue. These companies will be selected completely on merit by a selection committee that includes:
Eric Norlin Chris Shipley (Guidewire Group) Mathew Ingram (MESH and GigaOm) John Musser (Programmable Web) Laura Merling (Alcatel-Lucent) Alex Williams (ReadWriteWeb) Jeff Lawson (Twillio) Jeff Hammond (Forrester) Ian Gl;azer (Gartner) Ben Kepes (Diversity.net) Krish Subramanian (CloudAve) Vinod Kurpad (Best Buy) Seth Levine (Foundry Group)
I’m excited because I feel like we have the ability to really change the game with this one. If you take away the company specific conference (Google i/o, Twitter, F8), there really just aren’t that many national-level gathering spots for developers in the cloud/API space. There are a lot of “business level” and “workshop” conferences that happen around cloud computing, but we’re talking DEVELOPERS.
And even where there are developer gatherings in the cloud/API space, the ability to pay has always been a limiting factor for startups and companies wanting tho show their wares and exhibit.
That ends with Gluecon 2011. With Gluecon 2011 developers in the cloud/API space have the ability to participate in a pure meritocracy. Wow the selection committee and you’re in.
At the end of the day, what I want to see is 500+ developers coming to Gluecon to build apps, figure out cloud infrastructure, scaling, security, and solve the tough problems around API construction, usage and maintenance.
If you’re a company interested in participating, click here for more details.
See you at Gluecon 2011!
Foundry Group Invests in Urban Airship
We recently led the $5.4 million Series B funding round of Urban Airship. Besides our normal excitement of finding another great company to partner with, we are especially pleased to announce this as our first investment in our second fund.
Launched in June 2009, Urban Airship has found early success providing mobile developers with tools to optimize their applications, including easy-to-implement products for mobile messaging and content delivery and authorization. To date, Urban Airship has delivered more than 1 billion mobile messages across the Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. Many of the top brands in entertainment, media, publishing and gaming depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile marketing initiatives are profitable and scalable.
Urban Airship’s line of real-time messaging products, AirMail, helps businesses significantly increase user engagement with their brand and deliver more value to users by delivering push notifications. AirMail has been big business for Urban Airship since it gained early market traction by powering push notifications for Tapulous’ runaway hit app, Tap Tap Revenge, the first app in Apple’s App Store to be enabled with push. Since then, the company has helped popular mobile app publishers such as Universal Entertainment Group, Dictionary.com, LivingSocial, and Gowalla find success — and increase revenue — from their mobile apps. Most recently, Verizon Wireless named Urban Airship its preferred provider of push notifications across the entire Verizon developer network.
Urban Airship’s in-app purchase product, StoreFront, provides users with easy one-click purchases through Apple’s iTunes, thus opening up a new mobile channel for selling existing content. StoreFront also includes functionality to enable subscriptions through the iTunes interface, a much-needed solution to publisher challenges in managing and authenticating user devices for ongoing content access.
The company is located in Portland, OR which is a new geography for us, but with familiar and well-respected partner True Ventures, whom we’ve had the pleasure of working with on several other companies.
Fox Business Reports on California Companies Headed to Boulder
Today, Fox Business reporter Adam Shapiro spent some time in Boulder talking to folks about what is special about creating a company here.
He began the day at the Boulder Open Coffee Club, an informal twice-monthly gathering for those to talk tech, startups, geek and anything else of interest. Stay tuned for our personal blogs to see what we individually had to say on the subject.
