Social Ad Startup Funnely Raises Seed Funding From Verizon Ventures

Funnely, a startup that helps e-commerce companies automate and improve their ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, has raised $988,000 in a seed round led by Verizon Ventures.

The product uses businesses’ customer data to create and target ads. The goal is to effectively reach consumers throughout the sales funnel, whether it’s first getting their attention through lead generation campaigns or driving purchases through retargeting.

When I first wrote about Funnely in February, its target advertisers were small businesses that didn’t have sophisticated social ad strategies and weren’t being served by existing ad products.

According to co-founder and CEO Lucila Campos, the company is now working with larger advertisers as well, but she said it remains unique thanks to its “100 percent focus” on e-commerce advertisers, as well as its data-driven approach. Funnely, she said, is “where data meets automation.”

“We give that to you on a self-serve platform that you can use to have hundreds of ads running in just a few minutes,” Campos added.

For example, Funnely worked with Canadian retailer Native Shoes to improve return on ad spend by 7x and improve online sales by 2.5x. (You can read more in this case study.)

Funnely was started in Buenos Aires, and although it’s now headquartered in San Francisco, the development and design teams are still based in Argentina. Campos said this means Funnely can do a lot with a relatively small seed round.

In addition to Verizon (which owns AOL, which in turn owns TechCrunch), seed investors include 500 Startups, MITS Fund and Pallasite Ventures.