Semantic ad technology provider Peer39 is announcing the closing of its Series C round to the tune of $10.5M, pushing the total amount of funding raised to over $22M. The round was led by Israeli VC Evergreen Venture Partners and was joined by the company’s existing investors Canaan Partners, Dawntreader Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and JP Morgan.
Since taking an in-depth look at Peer39 nearly a year ago, the company has shifted its focus from developing its own ad network to leveraging its semantic ad platform to transform publishers’ remnant ad inventory into a premium one. The company claims that 70-80% of publisher impressions are sold today as remnant inventory, and that its technology is perfectly suited to analyze these pages so they can instead be used to serve top-tier advertising inventory.
Take news sites as an example: These will often categorize themselves as “News” in ad server profiles but in reality they publish content that varies in categories—finance, health, travel, etc. Peer39’s SemanticMatch technology analyzes these pages in real time to determine what they’re really about. Amiad Solomon (CEO) tells me that they are able to shift up to 70% of news content into more sellable categories. Peer39 also offers SemanticProtect, a collection of ‘brand-protecting’ algorithms that can identify whether pages possess content that can be classified as objectionable or sensitive to advertisers (i.e. crime, terror, politics).
Integrating with Peer39 requires publishers to add a small piece of JavaScript on their site. On page-load, a request is made to Peer39’s servers, which analyzes the data semantically and assigns the most relevant and profitable advertising channel for the given page. This is where much of the company’s semantic and data mining algorithms come into play. Results are sent back instantly to the publisher and integrated within its ad serving systems allowing the most profitable semantic ad (display or text) to be displayed.