Ad Targeting Startup Adelphic Mobile Raises $10M Led By Google Ventures

Adelphic Mobile, a mobile ad startup founded by executives from Quattro (which Apple acquired and turned into its iAd program), has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures.

The startup previously raised a $2 million seed round led by Matrix Partners, who also contributed to the new funding. In the funding press release, Google Ventures Managing Partner Rich Miner said Adelphic is “pioneering a new way to identify mobile consumers by taking vast amounts of data and mining it to develop a holistic picture of the mobile user for brand owners.”

The company says it uses predictive modeling to deliver better targeting for advertisers, analyzing 30 different signals to determine a visitor’s age, gender, time, and place, and that’s already leading to a big improvement in campaign results.

Jennifer Lum was vice president of ad operations at Quattro, and she founded Adelphic with her former Quattro colleague Changfeng Weng back in 2010. She told me activity on the platform is now approaching a total of 20 billion transactions, and the round will help Adelphic continue to grow, both by expanding the tech team and by hiring more marketers — with a team of 22, it hasn’t really had much of a marketing team before this, she said.

Since Adelphic first publicly announced its technology and funding in March, we’ve seen the launch of a number of other mobile targeting startups (including AdMobius, which was also founded by team members from Quattro and iAd). Lum said that seems like a “natural evolution” of the industry: “To take mobile advertising to the next level, we really need to move away from devices and carriers to real people and consumers.” At the same time, she said Adelphic’s technology “is still pretty unique” — there are other companies offering data management, or connecting desktop targeting with mobile, whereas Adelphic is “really focused on mobile as a channel” and helping brands understand their audiences on that channel.