Pixalat raised $ 18.1 million in growth capital for its fraud prevention, privacy, and compliance analytics platform that monitors connected television and mobile advertising.
Western Technology Investment and Javelin Venture Partners led the latest financing round, which brings Pixalate’s total funding to $ 22.7 million to date. That includes a $ 4.6 million Series A round raised back in 2014, Pixalate founder and CEO Jalal Nasir told ProWellTech.
With offices in Palo Alto and London, the company analyzes over 5 million apps in five app stores and more than 2 billion IP addresses on 300 million connected televisions to detect and report fraudulent advertising activities for its customers. In fact, there are over 40 types of illegal traffic, Nasir said.
Nasir grew up with his grandfather at livestock exhibitions and has learned how to spot flaws in animals, hiding behind real advertising that drains smartphone batteries or sucks away internet usage and even advertising revenue.
Digital advertising is big business. Nasir cited a study by the Association of National Advertisers that found an estimated $ 200 billion will be spent on digital advertising worldwide this year. That’s up from $ 10 billion in pre-2010. In the meantime, advertising fraud is estimated to cost the industry $ 35 billion, he added.
“Advertisers pay a premium to stand in front of the right audience based on usage data,” said Nasir. “Unfortunately, this data cannot be authorized by the user or transmitted without his consent.”
While many of Pixalate’s competitors focus on first-party risks, the company takes a third-party approach, largely due to the fact that people spend so much time with their devices. Some of the findings the company found include that 16% of Apple’s apps have no privacy policies, while that number is 22% on Google’s App Store. More crime and more government regulations on privacy are driving advertisers to demand more answers, he said.
The new funding will serve to add more privacy and data capabilities to its product, double the sales and customer teams, expand the London office and open a new office in Singapore.
The company has increased its sales by 1,200% since 2014 and collects over 2 terabytes of data per month. In addition to the five app stores that Pixalate is already monitoring, Nasir intends to add some of the China-based stores like Tencent and Baidu.
Noah Doyle, managing director at Javelin Venture Partners, also oversees the digital advertising ecosystem, saying that as networks grow, each junction exposes a place in an app where malicious actors who have been inaccessible in the past can enter, and advertisers a path to protect that.
“Jalal and Amin (Bandeali) have insight into where the fraud might be taking place and have created a unique opportunity to solve this huge problem,” added Doyle. “We were impressed with their insight and vision of developing an analytical approach to capturing every data point in a series of transactions – more data than other players in the industry – for full visibility that helps advertisers and marketers understand the quality of their advertising to be maintained. “
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