Seattle, April 5, 2018—Ad Lightning, Inc. whose software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence tools help publishers and advertisers combat “bad ads,” data theft, malware and other issues associated with the $39 billion programmatic advertising industry, has completed a $2 million seed financing round, led by two previous backers: Seattle-based Flying Fish Partners and Pioneer Square Labs. To date, the company has raised $4.8M in three rounds. Other participants in the round include Sinclair Digital Ventures, an investment division of Sinclair Broadcast Group, which participated in an earlier seed round, as well as funding from Seattle Angel Fund, Curious Capital and The Alliance of Angels.
Ad Lightning’s patent-pending intelligence suite gives digital publishers, ad networks and brands effective tools to monitor and manage programmatic advertising creative. Programmatic has become the dominant standard for delivering online and mobile ads, but has increasingly carried with it a raft of issues which threaten publisher revenues, brand reputations and consumer experience. Ad Lightning delivers proactive bad ad protection, live site scanning and ad network insights that help publishers and exchanges take control of and eliminate bad ads which can slow site performance, deliver malware, enable consumer data theft and depress publisher revenue.
“Publishers, brands, agencies and ad networks face an unprecedented sense of urgency to police bad practices and protect consumers from a number of digital advertising issues including latency, privacy violations and malware. Ad quality issues degrade publishers’ user experience and harm their brands,” said Scott Moore, Ad Lightning CEO and co-founder. “Ad Lightning’s growing customer roster of leading media companies depends on the robust protections and intelligence we deliver today. This new funding allows us to expand our sales team and invest in our products which offer publishers and exchanges the best possible return on their investment. We’re grateful to have investors who believe in us as well as in the importance of a healthy and consumer-friendly media industry.”
“We’re impressed with Ad Lightning’s digital media marketplace acumen,” said Frank Chang, Managing Partner, Flying Fish Partners, who will serve as an Ad Lightning Board Observer. “Scott and his team have a proven ability to quickly produce seriously needed solutions that benefit the entire publishing ecosystem and we believe they’ll grow as a trusted partner to publishers, advertisers, agencies and networks.”
“The Ad Lightning team immediately got traction with the industries they serve because they’ve lived it,” said Mike Galgon, Pioneer Square Labs managing director and Ad Lightning board member. “Because they’ve been publishers, in ad ops, on the agency side and brand stewards, they knew how to build what clients need, solve their biggest pain points and help them future-proof their business for global challenges to come, whether that’s being GDPR compliant later this year or helping publishers protect their audiences’ data.”
Ad Lightning is the digital media industry’s most comprehensive ad intelligence platform, focused on bringing transparency and control to a chaotic programmatic world by helping publishers and exchanges manage their ad quality more effectively. Ad Lightning’s live site scanning uses patent-pending technology that builds synthetic audiences and sends them to sites to mimic human behavior, capturing data on the quality of ads, highlighting the source of bad ones and proactively blocking malware and other types of unwanted ad units. Its Insights Dashboard includes valuable data and trend analytics, including a network health score, customized ad thresholds, Individual ad scores, partner trending, fraud analysis, log-level issue resolution and more. More information about the company is available at adlightning.com or by following @AdLightningTech on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
For media inquiries, contact:
Jeanne Meyer for Ad Lightning, 917.816.5773, jeannepmeyer@gmail.com, @jeannepmeyer