Montréal-based Optable has raised $26 million CAD ($20 million USD) to expand the reach of its data platform designed to protect user data while making advertising campaigns easier to manage.
Optable was founded by a trio that sold their last venture, AdGear, to Samsung Ads.
The Series A round came from Brightspark Ventures and a group of corporate venture groups: Desjardins Capital, Deloitte Ventures, Hearst Ventures, and AsterX, the corporate venture arm of Quebecor. Optable noted other investors also took part but did not disclose who. The startup also did not disclose the lead investor for the round.
Optable is a software data platform designed for advertising. It uses data clean rooms, an industry term for software that enables advertisers and brands to aggregate, anonymize, and compare user information in a way that protects user privacy. Companies use clean rooms to compare the first-party data they collect through online advertising to large sets of anonymized, aggregated data. This allows companies to see how their advertising campaigns might be performing and make adjustments.
Optable was founded in 2020 by Yves Poiré, Vlad Stesin, and Bosko Milekic, a trio that previously built and sold their last venture, AdGear, to Samsung Ads in 2016. Samsung Ads’ Canada business was built, in part, off of that acquisition of AdGear.
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This latest funding round brings Optable total funding to date to around $30 million CAD ($23 million USD) after the startup first raised a $4.3 million CAD ($3.6 million USD) seed round in 2021. Brightspark is a return investor for this Series A round having led the seed financing.
In addition to financing, Hearst, the parent company of Hearst Ventures, has signed a commercial agreement with Optable. Hearst is a global data and media company that owns a variety of assets and has operations in 40 countries. Optable’s solution is likely attractive to Hearst as it has ownership in cable television networks such as A&E, History, Lifetime, and ESPN, as well as 33 television stations, 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers, digital services businesses, and nearly 260 magazines globally.
Optable currently has customers in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Julian Hochgesang.