Adtech startup expands in SG, backed by SG$3.3m funding

Adtech startup Scibids has opened its Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore, following a SG$3.3 million Series A funding last year. Rahul Vasudev, former managing director of MediaMath (Asia Pacific) will head Scibid’s APAC expansion. He was previously the APAC head of digital at MediaCom for over two years. As head of digital, he was in-charge of Procter & Gamble (P&G). According to his LinkedIn, he was tasked to the digital work under P&G's brands. Prior to that he was working with Nokia. Nokia was MediaCom’s flagship global account until 2008.Scibids’ Singapore presence is its first international office and mirrors its global expansion strategy – over 50% of Scibids’ revenue is already from overseas, ranging from Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney in APAC to New York and San Francisco in the United States. Based in Paris, Scibids has developed a unique AI-based intelligence layer, which acts as a virtual trader on top of demand-side platforms (DSPs) such as Google’s DV360, The Trade Desk, MediaMath and AppNexus. It sorts through as many as 22 million variables such as geography, gender, site placements and third party data to automatically build thousands of highly granular buying strategies in the DSP. With these epiphanies at hand, media agencies and marketers who have in-housed programmatic buying can improve their return on ad spend by targeting the right contexts more accurately and optimise towards their own custom business metrics.Scibids’ disruptive technology has contracts with over 40 clients comprising leading global agencies and media buyers in 12 different countries, all in less than 24 months.“Scibids in a way, is helping take digital media buying to new levels of effectiveness through the application of machine learning into the media decisioning process. At the moment, we are delivering a step change in media effectiveness to marketers and their agencies. Across categories, our clients are seeing 40 to 70% KPI improvement. This includes performance marketers within the travel and eCommerce sectors, brand marketers from sectors such as FMCG and those in between like automotive, insurance and so on,” said Scibids founder Julien Hirth.“Asia Pacific is an important market. It is expected to be a major growth region, contributing 35% of global ad spend this year. Digital advertising share is also forecasts to constitute 49% of total ad spend in the region. The APAC HQ in Singapore will help brands and media buyers in the region get the most of their advertising platforms and solutions, creating an ecosystem that in turn creates growth.” said Mr Vasudev.“The role Scibids is increasingly playing, is that of an intelligence layer that enables marketers, agencies and their DSP partners to work in harmony. For example, some of our clients who use third party data sources or intelligent attribution models are able to bring the data and learning back into the media optimisation process,” added co-founder Mr Lemonnier.