Quantcast is announcing two big hires today — a new chief financial officer, Peter Kuipers, and its first senior vice president of engineering, Peter Sirota.
Quantcast is best known as an online measurement company, but its businesses involves using that data for online ad buying and targeting. We reported last year that it had hit a $100 million revenue run rate, and now I’m hearing from a source close to the company that it’s now seeing single days with $1 million in revenue.
Looking ahead, CEO and co-founder Konrad Feldman told me that the company remains focused on the transition to programmatic advertising (where ads are bought in an automated, software- and algorithm-driven fashion).
“I don’t believe we can be substantial player in this shift to programmatic unless we’ve got a plan to the future,” he said. “That means strengthening our team in finance and engineering as we continue to scale and support our customers.”
Kuipers joins from The Weather Company, where he was also CFO. He told me sees big opportunities for Quantcast and its “unique technology,” particularly internationally.
Sirota, meanwhile, was previously general manager for Amazon’s data processing technology Amazon Elastic MapReduce. He noted that Quantcast wasn’t one of his customers there, which he said was “intriguing”: “The technology that these guys have built is really providing them an edge in what the state of the art is at the moment.”
“Quantcast one of a very small number of companies for which big data is more than a marketing term,” Sirota added.
Kuipers and Sirota will both work out of Quantcast’s San Francisco headquarters. (The company’s previous CFO was based in New York City.) Feldman said Quantcast’s full headcount is now around 600. Acquisitions like the recent Struq deal have contributed to that growth, but he said it’s mostly been through regular hiring.