Moloco, a mobile performance advertising startup founded by former Google engineers, raises $11 million in Series B funding

Moloco, a mobile performance advertising startup founded by former Google engineers, announced it has secured $11 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Samsung Ventures and Draper Athena, with participation from Mirae Asset Management, Smilegate Investment and KTB Ventures. The company plans to use proceeds from the investment to advance development of the firm’s proprietary Ad Cloud platform and related solutions, as well as to support expansion of sales and marketing initiatives. Moloco is a mobile advertising Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company that turns user data into ad performance, enabling mobile businesses to execute marketing and advertising monetization programs in-house with no upfront cost and to achieve short time to market.

The Palo Alto, Calififornia-based Moloco was founded in 2013 with a vision to empower mobile businesses to thrive.  The company is led by an executive team with deep experience in mobile and online advertising infrastructure, as well as machine learning. Co-founder and CEO Ikkjin Ahn previously served as YouTube’s first monetization machine learning engineer and was the Big Data team lead for Android. The company’s core team includes former Google engineering talents who are experienced in ad-centric machine learning as well as in building mobile ad infrastructure solutions.

Moloco powers a healthy mobile ecosystem by delivering every component needed to run an effective mobile advertising business. At the heart of Moloco’s platform is the company’s battle-tested predictive ad performance engine, powered by machine learning. The Moloco performance engine enables publishers to transform data into advertising performance and, ultimately, revenue. With Moloco, app publishers have a unique platform capable of monetizing both marketing and advertising programs within the same solution. A machine learning algorithm optimizes delivery and performance across different ad creative types, while proprietary fraud tools protect ad spending.

“Our vision is to drive a healthy mobile ecosystem by providing mobile app developers and publishers with a turn-key advertising infrastructure that empowers them to run their own advertising business,” commented Ikkjin Ahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Moloco. “Our platform helps users see more relevant ads while reducing fraud and providing advertisers with greater choice and better performance.”

The comprehensive Moloco platform offers solutions for large-scale mobile platforms, app publishers and ad networks. It also includes: User Acquisition Tools, User Re-Engagement Tools, and DoubleCheck Fraud Analysis.

Ad Cloud is built on a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure, and Moloco’s comprehensive suite of tools is available as on-demand service offerings. Moloco readily integrates with popular industry solutions, including Google AdX and Twitter Mopub, and has the performance to handle more than 550,000 bid request queries per second, as well as to dynamically price and purchase ad space on popular exchanges within just 100 milliseconds.

According to Samsung, “Moloco’s state-of-the-art machine learning performance engine and cloud-based ad infrastructure are what mobile platforms have been looking for. We are excited about the opportunity to back a strong team with solid technology.”

“Moloco is set to disrupt the mobile ecosystem,” said Perry Ha, Draper Athena Managing Director. “Just as AWS enabled tech companies to easily scale their infrastructure, Moloco’s Ad Cloud will empower mobile apps to scale their ad monetization by providing a powerful performance-based mobile ad Infrastructure-as-a-Service.”

Moloco is ranked highly in TUNE Inc.’s conversion rate chart, as well as AppsFlyer’s Performance Index for 2018. The company is heavily tech-driven and employs top technical talent from Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Goldman Sachs. Partners include AdColony, Adjust, AppLovin, AppsFlyer, Branch, DoubleClick, Kochava, Mopub, Rubicon, Singular, Smaato and TUNE Inc.