TubeMogul Gearing Up for an IPO This Year

According to an eMarketer report on online video advertising published in early 2013, the spending on online video ad market in the US is projected to grow from $4.14 billion in 2013 to $8.04 billion by 2016, a 25% compound annual growth rate. The growth is driven by the increased adoption of social media services and online video streaming options.

TubeMogul’s Offerings

Emeryville, California-based TubeMogul helps companies make informed decisions about video inventory. TubeMogul was founded in 2006 by Brett Wilson and John Hughes as the world’s first online video analytics technology provider. Today, their platform helps organizations by integrating the ability to buy video inventory in real-time across multiple devices and formats on one platform. Organizations are able to make better informed decisions by evaluating ad targeting, optimization, and brand measurement. Their result-driven tools help attract some of the largest brands and marketing agencies.

TubeMogul’s offerings are available to agencies and brands and they earn an estimated 60% of their revenues from ad agencies. They have partnered with inventory sources including direct publishers and private networks and sell this inventory to organizations along with advanced analytics tools. Their platform integrates buying and analytic tools and includes features such as the ability to access from any web browser, multi-user login, and letting brands and agencies standardize global video strategy and execution. Through the campaign planning section, the platform enables an integrated approach for programmatic video buying. Their advertising software simplifies media buying process across all screens and grants them access to video inventory including pre-roll, in-banner, social, mobile, tablet, and connected TV inventory that is available both on public exchanges and through private deals. The platform also offers advertisers the ability to control more than 10 targeting parameters so that advertisements can be targeted with more accuracy.

TubeMogul prides itself in being able to offer a highly transparent solution. Their recently released BrandSights solution uses anonymous cookie data to identify consumers who have watched brand video ads served through their platform and then perform detailed analytics in terms of enabling customers to get an insight into user demographics to see how ads are performing. They focus on viewability and their customers pay only when the end consumer watches videos. TubeMogul hopes to attract more ad dollars from the traditional TV ad dollars by offering this higher benefit of user engagement. They earn revenues by selling their ad-buying technology and the video ad network business. The revenues are split nearly evenly between the two segments.

Their customers include names like Lenovo and Chrysler Group. Analysts estimate that they earned over $100 million in revenues last year. They are venture funded with $53.2 million in investments from NSV, Bee Partners, Dave Toth, Dick Costolo, Roger Ehrenberg, Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners, Trinity Ventures, Foundation Capital, Northgate Capital, SingTel Innov8, and Cross Creek Capital. Their last round of funding was held in May last year when they raised $10 million in a round led by SingTel Innov8 for expansion in Asia. They are now looking to raise funds through an IPO and are in discussions with Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup to be their lead bankers.