Quattro Alums Launch Mobile Targeting Startup Adelphic, Raise $2M

Two mobile veterans who worked together at Quattro Wireless, the mobile ad network that formed the basis of Apple’s iAd program, are announcing a new company today called Adelphic Mobile.

Jennifer Lum, who was the vice president of ad ops at Quattro, tells me that me that she teamed up with her Quattro colleague Changfeng Wang because they wanted to tackle some of the unsolved problems in mobile advertising. Specifically, she says that Wang has developed new “AudienceCube” targeting technology that should help “unlock” the brand badges for mobile campaigns, giving advertisers new insight about who exactly their ads are reaching.

Adelphic’s Predictive Data Platform can be sold to advertisers and publishers to help them optimize campaigns. For example, Lum says Adelphic could partner with a publisher like TechCrunch to use predictive modeling to determine which members of its readership are likely to fall into a specific demographic, and to target ads based on those predictions. Early tests, which began in the third quarter of last year, have already shown a dramatic improvement in campaign results, she says.

The company is also announcing a $2 million seed round of funding. Matrix Partners’ Antonio Rodriguez is joining Adelphic’s board of directors, and he compares Adelphic to the last Matrix investment that I talked to him about, The Echo Nest. There might not seem to be much connection between a music startup and mobile ad tech, but Rodriguez said both startups have taken a time-consuming process and improved it by making it technologically- and algorithmically-driven.