Browsing Tag: Startups

U.K.-based mental health startup eQuoo has become the only game in the U.K.’s National Health Service App Library and is set to shortly close its seed funding round. The app is an emotional fitness game that aims to teach healthy psychological skills.

The NHS announcement means a U.K. doctor can now formally refer eQuoo to their patients to improve their mental health and well-being.

The app has also now achieved a top rating at ORCHA, the leading health app assessment platform, and now has clients including Barmer, the largest insurance company in Germany.

Founder and CEO Silja Litvin says she created the startup because of the mental health crisis. “While working in an NHS Trust for eating and mood disorders I was dismayed about the fact that many of our young clients had to wait months to see us for a measly six sessions. Psychologists are not scalable, but apps are, so I decided to make an app. After developing PsycApps, an evidence-based anti-depression app, I learned the hard way that mental health apps all struggle with drop-off rates of up to 90% in week 1, so we pivoted towards gamification with the launch of eQuoo, as casual games can have a positive mental health effect and intrinsically get players to stick to them.”

A spokesperson for the NHS said: “Approximately 58% GPs across England now have the ability to refer patients directly to eQuoo, as its now live on the EMIS App Library. The EMIS App Library is powered by IQVIA’s AppScript® platform, which enables clinical users of the EMIS Web clinical system to find and recommend high-quality digital health apps to their patients via text or email, directly from their existing workflow. All apps listed on the platform (including eQuoo) have been evaluated under NHS Digital’s digital assessment questions (DAQ) and assessed for their clinical safety, data protection, security and usability.”

Earlier this year the startup also gained scientific backing for its app, going through a “three-arm,” five-week, randomized control trial with more than 350 participants, with Bosch UK. By contrast Woebot, a highly lauded mental health chatbot startup, went through only a two-week trial with 70 participants.

Results showed “statistically significant increases in well-being metrics” and a significant decrease in anxiety when using the app over a time frame of five weeks.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mental health startup eQuoo joins UK’s NHS app library, closes in on seed round

Huel, the European purveyor of nutritional bars, supplements and meal-replacement shakes, is bringing its snack bars to the U.S.

The company, which has been selling the bars in Europe for a while, is launching with two flavors in the U.S.: chocolate and salted caramel.

The bars contain 27 vitamins and minerals and are 200 calories apiece. Huel is selling the bars online for now at $28 per-box of 15 bars.

The bars are made using oat flour, rolled oats, pea and brown rice proteins, cocoa powder, coconut, date syrup, flax seed and a blend of vitamins and minerals, which the company adds to its mixture.

To date the company has sold more than 50 million shakes, powders or bars in 80 countries around the world.

“As Huel has continued its rapid growth in the United States, with millions of meals from our powders and ready-to-drinks being enjoyed from coast to coast, we are proud to introduce the Huel Bar to the U.S. marketplace,” said Julian Hearn, CEO and co-founder of Huel. “We have created a truly unique bar that not only tastes great but provides the important nutrition you need between meals or on-the-go.”

Huel’s bars enter a crowded market where nutritional supplements and meal replacements are big business. In 2017, Kellogg’s bought RxBar for $600 million and the acquisition has proven to be a huge boon for the company — boosting sales as cereal sales decline.

Soylent, the startup darling that rejuvenated the meal-replacement market in the U.S. with a new formulation and a pitch to Silicon Valley’s coders, is also making snack bars.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Huel brings its nutrition bars to the US

Speechly, a startup out of Helsinki that boasts an experienced team of speech recognition and “natural language understanding” experts, has raised €2 million in seed funding to make it easier for developers to add a voice UI to their products.

The round is led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Quantum Angels, Joyance Partners, Social Starts, Tiny.vc, Juha Paananen (co-founder of Nonstop Games, which exited to King) and Nicolas Dessaigne (founder of Algolia). The funding will be used by Speechly to further develop and open up its API to enable non-experts to create voice-enabled applications.

“Voice has shown real promise over the past few years but a real breakthrough beyond setting kitchen timers and playing Spotify is yet to be seen,” Speechly co-founder and CEO Otto Söderlund tells TechCrunch. “The current fundamental problem of voice assistant platforms is that they tend to fail with more complex user requests and needs.”

He says Speechly’s solution is to combine natural language understanding and speech recognition in a “novel way” that enables developers to a create a “highly reactive and seamlessly multimodal user experience” that better guides the user when expressing complex intents.

“You can think of the difference a little bit like trying to explain something tricky to your friend over the phone [which can be hard] versus face-to-face [which is often a lot easier],” says Söderlund.

To achieve this, Speechly has designed its own proprietary speech recognition technology “from the ground up” to support what it claims is a significantly wider range of voice-related user experiences compared to existing products.

As well as helping voice applications better understand complex intent, the other major problem that Speechly wants to solve is the business case for voice. The startup argues current voice assistant platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, force businesses “to operate in someone else’s ecosystem” and share valuable user data.

Meanwhile, Speechly says current SDKs and APIs are either too complex or do not offer developers enough control over the end user experience.

“In addition to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, there are a few smaller companies and startups developing their own spoken language understanding (SLU) technology,” adds Söderlund. “These companies, owning their own proprietary SLU technology (as we do), we consider as our main competitors. However, these competitors mainly offer products that we consider a rather straightforward continuation from the classical turn-based dialog agent (think of Siri). We want to offer an alternative vision for voice UIs where highly responsive multimodal feedback ‘guides’ the user in real-time to resolve more demanding user tasks. This vision that we are building in our product we consider unique.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Helsinki’s Speechly raises €2M seed for its ‘natural language understanding’ API

One of the more notable startups using artificial intelligence to understand and fight cancer has raised $45 million more in funding to continue building out its operations and inch closer to commercialising its work.

Paige — which applies AI-based methods such as machine learning to better map the pathology of cancer, an essential component of understanding the origins and progress of a disease with seemingly infinite mutations (its name is an acronym of Pathology AI Guidance Engine) — says it will be use the funding to inch closer to FDA approvals for products it is developing in areas such as biomarkers and prognostic capabilities.

It also plans to use the funding to continue developing better ways of diagnosing and ultimately fighting the disease, as well as exploring further commercial opportunities for its work, specifically within the bio-pharmaceutical industry.

This round is being led by Healthcare Venture Partners, with previous investor Breyer Capital, Kenan Turnacioglu and other funds participating. The company is not disclosing its valuation, but PitchBook noted that a first close of this round (when it raised $33 million) put the valuation at $208 million. That would value Paige now at about $220 million with the $45 million close, more than three times its valuation in its previous round.

Paige first emerged from stealth back in 2018 — with a bang.

Paige.AI — as it was known at the time — was hatched inside the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the world’s foremost institutions both for working on cancer therapies and treating cancer patients, and along with a $25 million investment led by Jim Breyer, Paige had secured exclusive access to MSK’s 25 million pathology slides as well as its intellectual property related to the AI-based computational pathology that underpinned its work. These slides make up one of the biggest repositories of its kind in the world, and as all solutions and services built on machine learning are only as good as the data that’s fed into them, they were critical to the startup’s beginnings.

The startup also launched with some serious talent behind it.

Much of the computational pathology being used by Paige had been developed by Dr Thomas Fuchs, who is known as the “father of computational pathology” and is the director of Computational Pathology in The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, as well as a professor of machine learning at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.

Fuchs co-founded Paige with Dr David Klimstra, chairman of the department of pathology at MSK, and Fuchs had originally started out as the CEO of Paige, but was replaced earlier this year by Leo Grady, who joined from another bio-startup, Heartflow (another company backed by Healthcare Venture Partners). Fuchs is still supporting the company, but no longer in an executive role.

In the nearly two years since it launched, there have been some milestones reached. The company, which has around 30 employees today, has been the first to get an FDA breakthrough designation (which helps expedite the long process of drug approvals in urgent areas where there are few or no other options for patients) for using AI in oncology pathology. It’s also the first to get a CE mark in the same category, which opens the door to working in Europe, too. Paige has so far ingested 1.2 million images into its slide database and is using them — in algorithms that also take in genomic data, drug response data and outcome data — to work on developing diagnostic solutions.

But as with all new medical products, progress is not measured in quarters as it might be with a more typical tech startup. Moving fast and breaking things is something to be avoided. So even with all of the above advances, there has yet to be any commercial products launched, nor is Grady giving any specific time frames for when they will. And when the company came out of stealth in 2018, it said it would be focusing on breast, prostate and other major cancers, although today it’s not as quick to specify what its targets will be when it does launch commercial products.

Similarly, it’s also expanding its remit from primarily clinical environments to pharmaceutical ones.

“The clinical side is still our focus, but this is an expansion and realisation that this has a broader impact, and that includes pharmaceutical customers,” Grady said. 

And the dropping of the .AI in its name was also intentional, in part a reaction it seems to how much AI gets thrown around today.

“There is a fundamental misconception, which is thinking of AI as a product and not a technology,” said Grady. “It’s a technology set that can allow you to do many things that could not have been done in the past, but you need to apply it in a meaningful way. Developing a good AI and putting that on the market will not cut it in terms of clinical adoption.”

The funding round, Grady said, saw a lot of interest from strategic investors, although the company intentionally has stayed away from these.

“We were approached by all of the scanner vendors and some of the biopharmaceutical companies,” he said. “But we made the decision to not take a strategic investment with this round because we wanted to be neutral with hardware vendors and not be too tied with any one.”

He also pointed to the challenges of talking to investors when you are working in a cutting-edge area (a challenge that has foxed many an investor also into backing the wrong horses, too, such as Theranos).

“We’re at the intersection of three areas: tech, medical devices and clinical medicine, and life sciences and biotech,” he said. “Many investors sit squarely in one and don’t feel comfortable in others. That makes the conversations challenging and short. But there has been an increasing blend between those three sectors.”

That’s where Healthcare Venture Partners fits into the mix. “Paige exemplifies the benefits of digital pathology and represents the bright future of AI-driven medical diagnosis,” said Jeff Lightcap of Healthcare Venture Partners, in a statement. “As hospitals embark on digital transformations, they will face challenges associated with these transitions. We believe Paige addresses many of these issues by enhancing the ability of clinical teams and pathologists to collaborate. We’re confident in Paige’s future and believe they will continue to develop cutting-edge technologies that enable pathology departments to transform their practices, which have changed little in the last century.”

“We applaud Paige’s commitment to building clinical AI products that will improve the diagnostic process and patient care,” added Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital, in a statement. “This is a critical time for Pathology, as pathologists are carrying a heavier workload than ever before. Paige understands their needs and the team has built cutting-edge technologies to address them. Paige represents the future of computational pathology and we look forward to their continued growth and success.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Paige raises M more to map the pathology of cancer using AI

Of all the startup jawns that could possibly come from Philadelphia, perhaps none is as unexpected as Jenzy, the startup that provides an online marketplace and virtual sizing tool for kids’ shoes.

The company, which has raised $1.25 million from Morgan Stanley’s Multicultural Innovation Lab, was born of desperation and grew up on two continents.

Co-founders Eve Ackerley and Carolyn Horner met five years ago in China while working as English language teachers in the remote corners of Yunnan province. Without much in the way of retail options, the two women resorted to doing much of their shopping online… and it was while searching for shoes that they realized one of the major pain points of the online retail experience was finding the right size.

Jenzy founders Carolyn Horner and Eve Ackerley

When they returned to the U.S. the idea stuck with them. So they set out to develop an application that would be able to size feet using nothing more than a smartphone, and worked with vendors to ensure that women could know their sizes and buy the right shoes.

As the idea evolved, the two first-time entrepreneurs realized that however annoying the buying process was for adults, the need for appropriately sized shoes and a marketplace to buy them was even more acute among children.

“The most proprietary part of what we do is standardize all the shoes on our platform,” says Horner.

The company works with brands like Converse, Saucony and Keds to send kids shoes that actually fit their feet. “A kid could be wearing a six in one shoe and a seven in another,” says Horner. Using Jenzy, the shoes will arrive in the right size for each foot. “We work with the suppliers to make sure that we’re sending the correct size to a parent when they check out on Jenzy.” 

For retailers, it’s an opportunity to reduce what amounts to a huge cost. The industry average rate for returns is 30%, and Horner says that Jenzy reduces that figure to 15%. And those savings matter in what’s an $11 billion industry, according to Horner’s estimates.

The company launched the first version of its app in July 2017 and just released an update earlier this year. To date, Horner estimates the company has sized 25,000 feet and had 15,000 downloads since May.

“The plan was to see about if we still were interested when we got back from China,” Horner says of the company’s early days. 

Initially, the two partners worked out of Ackerley’s parents’ house in California, but eventually moved to Philadelphia when the company pivoted to focus on children’s shoes to be close to their beta testers — Horner’s family, who had a lot of kids.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Philadelphia’s Jenzy has a tool to size kids’ feet and a marketplace to buy them the right shoes

Tusk Venture Partners, the venture capital firm led by Bradley Tusk and managing partner Jordan Nof, has secured $70 million for its second flagship fund, the firm has confirmed to TechCrunch following a report by Fortune this morning.

Fundraising for the effort began in January, when the pair filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission for Tusk Venture Partners II. The firm, and affiliated political advisory outfit Tusk Ventures, is behind a number of high-profile startups, including e-scooter “unicorn” Bird, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Ro, a direct-to-consumer healthcare business best known for selling erectile dysfunction medication.

The New York-based firm, founded in 2011, previously raised $36 million for its debut fund — capital it used to back fantasy sports company Fanduel, insurtech business Lemonade and D2C vitamin seller Care/of.

Tusk, before launching Tusk Ventures, served as campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg, as deputy governor of Illinois and as communications director for Senator Chuck Schumer. He also penned the book, The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics, released in 2018.

Naturally, Tusk Ventures provides companies more than just checks. The politically savvy team lends its expertise to support companies plagued with regulatory barriers and communications issues, as well as help with grassroots organizing, opposition research and partnerships.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Political ‘fixer’ Bradley Tusk closes second fund on M

Spotify did it. Slack did it. Many other late-stage private technology companies are reported to be seriously considering it. Should yours?

If you are a board member of a late-stage, venture-backed company or part of its management team, you likely have heard of the term “direct listing.” Or you may have attended one or all of the slew of recent conferences being hosted by big-name investment banks and others, including tech investor guru Bill Gurley, who recently debated the pros and cons of choosing a direct listing over a traditional IPO.

Before you decide what’s right for your company, here are a few things you need to know about direct listings.

Direct listings vs. IPOs

For people not familiar with the term, a direct listing is an alternative way for a private company to “go public,” but without selling its shares directly to the public and without the traditional underwriting assistance of investment bankers. 

In a traditional IPO, a company raises money and creates a public market for its shares by selling newly created stock to investors. In some instances, a select number of pre-IPO investors, usually very large stockholders or management, may also sell a portion of their holdings in the IPO. In an IPO, the company engages investment bankers to help promote, price and sell the stock to investors. The investment bankers are paid a commission for their work that is based on the size of the IPO—usually seven percent for a traditional technology company IPO.  

In a direct listing, a company does not sell stock directly to investors and does not receive any new capital. Instead, it facilitates the re-sale of shares held by company insiders such as employees, executives and pre-IPO investors. Investors in a direct listing buy shares directly from these company insiders. 

Does this mean that a company doing a direct listing doesn’t need investment banks? Not quite. Companies still engage investment banks to assist with a direct listing and those banks still get paid quite well (to the tune of $35 million in Spotify and $22 million in Slack). 

However, the investment banks play a very different role in a direct listing. Unlike a traditional IPO, in a direct listing, investment banks are prohibited under current law from organizing or attending investor meetings and they do not sell stock to investors. Instead, they act purely in an advisory capacity helping a company to position its story to investors, draft its IPO disclosures, educate a company’s insiders on process and strategize on investor outreach and liquidity.   

Understanding the current direct listings trend

The concept of a direct listing is actually not a new one.  Companies in a variety of industries have used similar structures for years. However, the structure has only recently received a lot of investor and media attention because high-profile technology companies have started to use it to go public. But why have technology companies only recently started to consider direct listings? 

The rise of massive pre-IPO fundraising rounds

With an abundance of investor capital, especially from institutional investors that historically hadn’t invested in private technology companies, massive pre-IPO fundraising rounds have become the norm. Slack raised over $400 million in August 2018—just over a year prior to its direct listing. Because of this widespread availability of capital, some technology companies are now able to raise sufficient capital before their actual IPO to either become profitable or put them on a path to profitability. 

Criticism of current IPO process

There has been increasing negative sentiment, especially amongst well-known venture capitalists, about certain aspects of the traditional IPO process—namely IPO lock-up agreements and the pricing and allocation process. 

IPO lock-up agreements. In a traditional IPO, investment bankers require pre-IPO investors, employees and the company to sign a “lock-up agreement” restricting them from selling or distributing shares for a specified period of time following the IPO—usually 180 days. The bankers put these agreements in place in order to stabilize the stock immediately after the IPO. While the merits of a lock-up agreement can certainly be debated, by the time VCs (and other insiders) are allowed to sell following an IPO, oftentimes the stock price has fallen significantly from its highs (sometimes to below the IPO price) or the post lock-up flood of selling can have an immediate negative impact on the trading price.  

In a direct listing, there is no lock-up agreement, which allows for equal access to the offering to all of the company’s pre-IPO investors, including rank-and-file employees and smaller pre-IPO stockholders.

IPO pricing and allocation: In a traditional IPO, shares are often allocated directly by a company (with the assistance of its underwriters) to a small number of large, institutional investors. Traditional IPOs are often underpriced by design to provide large institutional investors the benefit of an immediate 10-15% “pop” in the stock price. Over the last few years, some of these “pops” have become more pronounced. For example, Beyond Meat’s stock soared from $25 to $73 on its first day of trading, a 163% gain. This has fueled a concern, particularly shared amongst the VC community, that investment banks improperly price and allocate shares in an IPO in order to benefit these institutional investors, which are also clients of the same investment banks that are underwriting the IPO. While the merits of this concern can also be debated, in instances where there is a large price discrepancy between the trading price of the stock following the IPO and the price of the IPO, there is often a sense that companies have left money on the table and that pre-IPO investors have suffered unnecessary dilution. If the IPO had been priced “correctly,” the company would have had to sell fewer shares to raise the same amount of proceeds. 

Because a company is not selling stock in a direct listing, the trading price after listing is purely market driven and is not “set” by the company and its investment bankers. Moreover, since no new shares are issued in a direct listing, insiders do not suffer any dilution. 

The Spotify effect

Before Spotify’s direct listing, technology companies hadn’t used the direct listing structure to go public. Spotify was, in many ways, the perfect test case for a direct listing. It was well known, didn’t need any additional capital and was cash flow positive. In addition, prior to its direct listing, Spotify had entered into a debt instrument that penalized the company so long as it remained private. As a result, it just needed to go public. After clearing some regulatory hurdles, Spotify successfully executed its direct listing in April 2018. After Spotify’s direct listing, Slack (relatively) quickly followed suit. Slack’s direct listing was notable because it represented the first traditional Silicon Valley-based VC-backed company to use the structure. It was also an enterprise software company, albeit one with a consumer cult following. 

Is a direct listing right for my company?

While a direct listing offers many benefits, the structure does not make sense for every company. Below is a list of key benefits and drawbacks:

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Is a direct listing the right choice for your company?

The insurance industry, sleepy and ancient, is ripe for disruption. We’ve seen companies like Lemonade, Hippo and Rhino get in on that opportunity. Today, an insurtech company focused on small business insurance has raised $18 million to keep growing.

Meet Huckleberry, whose Series A was led by Tribe Capital, with participation from Amaranthine, Crosslink Capital and Uncork Capital.

Huckleberry launched in 2017 to offer business insurance, including workers’ compensation and general liability, all through an online portal.

Small business insurance coverage is not like car insurance or renters insurance. It’s not as simple as filling out a few forms and getting a quote. Even if a few platforms do have algorithms for providing quotes, you can’t really close the deal unless you get on the phone.

It’s an incredibly tedious and stressful process. In fact, Huckleberry co-founders Bryan O’Connell and Steve Au first came up with the idea for Huckleberry when they were seeking out their own small business coverage for a previous startup idea.

The industry itself is incredibly fragmented, which is caused in part by the fact that small business coverage underwriting varies wildly from business to business. For example, the policy for three or four restaurants might look relatively similar. However, a fast food restaurant might be identified as a higher risk with regards to workers’ compensation than a Michelin-star restaurant, where workers might be more eager to get back to work and take home their tip money. These differences come in the form of location, operations and many other factors, as well as business vertical.

Huckleberry has worked to build out myriad coverage verticals, including food and beverage, fitness, retail, legal, healthcare, hair and beauty and more.

The firm offers worker’s comp, as well as a package policy that includes general liability, property and business interruption insurance. Customers also can purchase add-ons like hired and non-owned auto insurance, employment practices liability insurance (EPLI), liquor liability insurance, employee dishonesty coverage, professional liability insurance, equipment breakdown coverage and spoilage coverage.

Huckleberry isn’t itself an insurance carrier, but does have the authority to underwrite and sell policies on behalf of the carrier. That said, Huckleberry’s expansion both by vertical and geography is more difficult than your average software startup. The regulatory landscape of insurance in the U.S. goes state by state.

“Our biggest challenge is navigating 50 states’ worth of extremely complicated regulations on something that is much more complicated than a software product,” said O’Connell. “We’re trying to protect individual workers and businesses all while staying fully compliant in every market.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Huckleberry raises M to put small business insurance online

Listening to the radio (yes, it still exists) the other day I realized that the “futurist” that was being interviewed was speculating that drones would “one day be delivering food, but not any time soon.”

Well, so much for that prediction. Because coming to an Irish household early next year will be drones delivering exactly that.

For Manna, a B2B drone delivery “as-a-service” company, today announced an additional funding round of $3 million, led by Dynamo VC, a logistics-focused fund. The move brings Manna’s total seed funding to $5.2 million.

Manna pitches itself as an “aviation-grade” drone delivery company, and plans to roll out a fully autonomous drone delivery platform beginning in early 2020, first in Europe and then in the U.S.

Manna’s drone itself is different. It is far more “modular” than other drones you might have seen, and therefore lends itself to logistics, like deliveries. It also uses custom-designed aerospace-grade drones built in  Europe and the U.S.

The drones are designed for “all weathers” and do not fly above 500 feet, taking them out of the airspace of planes. The initial food deliveries in Ireland will be in rural areas, eventually reaching the suburbs of towns and cities.

The first services offered will be to online meal ordering platforms, restaurant chains and “dark kitchens” with an incredible three-minute delivery promise. Obviously this would be far cheaper and faster than road-based deliveries, especially in rural areas.

It’s also teamed up with Flipdish, the company that operates an online delivery platform used by restaurants and takeaways in Ireland.

The Manna drone fleet will, they say, be operated directly from the restaurant or dark kitchen premises and will be accessible via API to food tech providers and online food platforms alike in a channel-agnostic manner. That means you end up with one drone fleet serving all and any of the providers, based on demand.

Founder and serial entrepreneur Bobby Healy previously built and sold Eland Technologies to SITA.AERO in 2003, and more recently built CarTrawler, a B2B mobility marketplace for the airline industry, where he is still on the board after several private equity LBOs.

Healy says: “We are on the cusp of the fifth industrial revolution — powered by drones — and our intention with Manna is to make drone delivery as pervasive as running water — to literally transform marketplaces, economies and communities all over the world in a way that not just reduces our carbon footprint, but saves lives and creates jobs while doing so.”

Jon Bradford, who led the investment for Dynamo Ventures, said: “It’s hard to find a rockstar team as ambitious and as capable as the Manna team, and in a domain that is as massive as it is difficult. In Bobby and his incredible team, we see a path to capture a real beachhead in this new emerging market that is truly unprecedented, and we look forward to helping accelerate their vision in the U.S. in 2020.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Drone delivery startup Manna boosts seed funding ahead of launch in Ireland

Smartly.io, a company helping advertisers automate their campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, has sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners for €200 million (approximately $223 million).

Helsinki-headquartered Smartly.io says it automates ad production, ad buying “and everything in between.” Founded in 2013, the company has more than 350 employees across 16 global offices, and it estimates that it will see €2.5 billion in ad spend moving through the platform this year. Advertisers include Uber, eBay, Under Armour and Samsonite.

That’s particularly impressive given the company’s relatively modest amount of outside funding — $22.8 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Lifeline Ventures and Highline Europe (through a secondary round).

“By partnering with Providence, Smartly.io gains invaluable strategic advisory, deep operational experience and market insight, especially in the U.S. where major Fortune 500 companies are only starting to automate their creative processes,” said Smartly.io founder and CEO Kristo Ovaska in the announcement.

The companies say that as part of the deal, Smartly.io’s founders Ovaska and Chief Product Officer Tuomo Riekki will maintain “significant ownership,” and will continue to lead the company. Providence Operating Partner Laura Desmond (who currently serves on the boards of Adobe, DoubleVerify and Capgemini) will become chairperson of the board of directors.

“Smartly.io is uniquely positioned to play a lead role in a market where brand and performance work is converging,” Desmond said in a statement. “Together, we intend to grow the Company’s presence in the U.S. and globally, expand to other platforms, and build relationships with brands and their partners to create value for all.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Social ad company Smartly.io sells a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners