StackAdapt raises $1m to scale native ad buying

StackAdapt has received a $1m cash investment from Plaza Ventures to help scale its platform for programmatic buying of native ads. “As brands look for more meaningful ways to reach customers, it’s clear that native advertising adds more value than banner ads, which are increasingly ignored,” said Plaza Ventures Managing Partner, Rob Richards.  

Funding round led by Toronto's Plaza Ventures

StackAdapt has received a $1 million cash infusion from Toronto VC firm Plaza Ventures to continue scaling its platform for programmatically buying native ads.

Plaza, an early-stage investor that has funded Canadian startups like social video platform Keek and location-based ad platform Adcentricity, said it was looking to add a promising native ad player to its portfolio.

“As brands look for more meaningful ways to reach customers, it’s clear that native advertising adds more value than banner ads, which are increasingly ignored,” said managing partner Rob Richards, who will join StackAdapt’s board of directors, in a statement.

The investment will add to the $900,000 already raised by StackAdapt in a 2014 funding round involving the Ontario government’s Investment Accelerator Fund and Slaight Communications.

StackAdapt’s self-serve platform assists online ad buyers in acquiring media across more than 35,000 desktop and mobile publishers, via integrations with 30 native ad supply sources like TripleLift, AdsNative and InMobi.

The “native” element means StackAdapt’s platform auto-generates ad creative that matches the specs of the host site and is relevant to the context of what the user’s looking at. Brands tend to use programmatic native for large-scale content distribution, though with post-click conversion analytics it can be used for more standard direct-response advertising as well.

“Brands and agencies have readily adopted our native ads solution since launch, and we plan to use this funding to scale the self-serve platform and help them drive more meaningful interactions with their branded content,” said StackAdapt cofounder Ildar Shah in a release. He noted that StackAdapt has so far run 1,500 campaigns on the platform, and typically yields click-through rates between 0.4% and 0.8%, much higher than the overall average CTR for display advertising in Canada (0.14%).