US-based ad analytics startup Edo has raised funds amounting to $12 million in Series A funding round. The particular round was led by Breyer Capital.
Along with this, Vista Equity co-founders Robert Smith and Brian Sheth participated in the round, as did WGI Group.
“For more than a decade I’ve watched the data science talent arbitrage transform industries from finance to defense, from transportation to commerce,” Breyer said. “We needed someone to bring these capabilities to bear on the systemic inefficiencies and methodological shortcomings of measurement and analytics in media and advertising.”
On the customer side, Edo is already working with ESPN, Turner, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. I wondered whether some of the TV networks might have been worried about what Edo would reveal about their ads, but Norton said the opposite was true.
The company claims to have a database of 47 million ad airings since its founding in 2015, so advertisers can see not just their own ad performance, but also that of their competitors. This enables advertisers to adjust their campaigns based on consumer engagement. In some cases, advertisers receive the overnight data and then adjust their ad rotation for that very night.
The company was founded by Daniel Nadler and actor Edward Norton. Nadler and Norton have both had startup success before. Nadler co-founded and led Kensho, which S&P Global acquired for $550 million. Norton invested in Kensho and co-founded CrowdRise, which was acquired by GoFundMe.