The Toronto-based online advertising and marketing company Chango just announced that it has raised $12 million. All of the participants in Chango’s last funding round also participated in this one, including iNovia, Rho Canada Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Mantella Venture Partners and Extreme Venture Partners. As Chango Founder and CEO Chris Sukornyk told me earlier this week, the company plans to use this new funding to expand its team through at least 50 new hires in sales, engineering, marketing and ad operations.
In the advertising world, Chango, which was founded four years ago, is mostly known for its ad retargeting services. The company currently runs its operations through three data centers spread around the world and bids on over 350,000 ad impressions per second on virtually all of the major ad exchanges. According to its own data, the company’s revenue has now grown 600 percent year-over-year for two years running.
Chango’s secret sauce is that it combines search data from its proprietary data network with first-part data from the 55 of the top 500 online retailers on its client roster. Because of this, as Sukornyk explained to me, the newly launched Chango Madison programmatic marketing and retargeting platform doesn’t suffer from the cookie loss that some of its competitors have to deal with. Unlike less integrated solutions that split the demand-side platform from the data-management platform, the new platform allows advertisers to target and re-target customers more granularly.
Thanks to this, you can, for example, make sure that your ads are seen by a potential customer who has been searching for a specific DSLR, went to your site a few times last week to look at them, but hasn’t bought it yet. Chango, of course, also allows advertisers to ensure that their ads aren’t seen by less valuable customers who, for example, don’t spend a lot of time on your site and randomly click around without any clear intent.
As Sukornyk told me, the company, which previously raised about $6.6 million through three rounds valued at $1.4 million, $4.25 million and just under $1 million, respectively, didn’t really have to go raise money. But the team decided that the company would “leave a huge opportunity on the market if [it] didn’t raise [its] headcount to try to expand” and try to compete effectively with the likes of BlueKai and AppNexus.