Under the Radar: Ad-tech unicorn Moloco on its US$2b valuation, growth drivers and business risks amid data protection trends and tech crackdowns

The Evening Runway with Elliott Danker, Timothy Go and Chua Tian Tian

Using the power of machine learning to help companies optimise the Return on Investment of their digital marketing strategies – that’s what we are talking about today.

Founded in 2013 by a group of former Google engineers, our guest is Silicon Valley based ad-tech unicorn Moloco. The company offers performance marketing solutions that help businesses maximise their advertising spend on mobile apps.

For one thing, Moloco’s demand side platform allows advertisers to purchase targeted ads on over 2 million apps automatically using a machine powered system, diversifying beyond the big players like Google and Meta.

Aside from helping individual advertisers place their ads and improve the outcomes of their media campaigns, Moloco also helps companies like online marketplaces build their own advertising business.

This is done by automatically assigning personalised ads based on real time user activity, with the ability to serve 20,000 advertisers in a day.

More recently, the firm also came out with an advertising solution for Over the Top (OTT) and streaming businesses to set up their own advertising business focused on outcomes.

The company had in July last year welcomed Fidelity Management & Research Company and Singapore’s EDBI as its shareholders through secondary share transactions.

The transactions put Moloco at a whopping US$2 billion, 40 per cent higher than its valuation of US$1.5 billion in a 2021 Series C round. But what were the drivers behind the big numbers?

On Under the Radar, The Evening Runway’s finance presenter Chua Tian Tian posed these questions to Nikhil Raj, Chief Business Officer of Retail Media, , Moloco.

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