Adtech company Vibe is trying to grab a slice of the growing streaming TV advertising pie by targeting brands that have never advertised on TV before.
Vibe focuses on “performance marketers” who tend to buy ads on Instagram — think direct-to-consumer beauty brands or gaming apps. For those advertisers, advertising on TV can feel overwhelming and expensive, compared to spinning up a social media campaign in a few clicks.
Founded four years ago, its self-service TV ad buying platform has been growing quickly. The company says it’s worked with more than 5,000 advertisers — from large companies, to app developers, and small businesses — to create and place ads across streaming TV platforms like Disney+ and Roku.
Vibe said it surpassed a $100 million revenue run rate this year. A run rate predicts how much revenue the company will generate in the next year if it continues at its current pace of performance.
On Tuesday, Vibe announced a $50 million Series B investment round, led by the venture capital firm Hedosophia. Existing investors, including Elaia and Singular, also participated. The round values Vibe at $410 million, the company said.
Vibe operates in a crowded space: Advertisers are forecast to spend $36.87 billion on connected-TV ads next year, per the research firm EMARKETER, a Business Insider sister company.
Big brands and agencies tend to lean on demand-side platforms from The Trade Desk, Google, and Amazon to handle their CTV ad buys. There’s also a host of adtech companies, like Vibe, that target smaller advertisers. Rival firms to Vibe include the publicly traded adtech company MNTN and startups like TVScientific, Tatari, and StackAdapt.
Arthur Querou, Vibe’s co-CEO and cofounder, told Business Insider that the company’s recent growth is down to the team refining its ad-targeting product, more customers adopting its generative AI creative studio, and Vibe improving its own marketing.
Querou said Vibe’s targeting platform sets it apart from competitors. “We built our own data assets that allow us to be much more granular” in matching a specific product to the right viewer, versus using data brokers, Querou said.
“We’ve transformed the whole buying stack into a recommendation engine,” he added.
Vibe also offers a generative AI studio, where advertisers enter their business name or URL, and the platform creates a video ad. The company said more than 10% of the ad creatives that run on its platform are currently AI-generated, a number Querou predicts will rise to 30% by the end of next year and 95% by 2028.
Querou described the Series B round as “a safety net for an aggressive go-to-market” strategy. The company uses the Vibe platform to advertise itself on CTV platforms, and also buys ads on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, X, Reddit, and billboards.
While Vibe plans on recruiting for some key product management roles, it isn’t planning an aggressive hiring strategy to match. It intends to build AI agents to handle tasks like account management as its self-service platform grows, Querou said.
“By building agents ourselves internally, it’ll avoid us having to hire 250 roles by the end of 2028,” he added.
Check out the pitch deck Vibe.co used to secure its $50 million Series B investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.
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