If you watched the Super Bowl last weekend, you’ve probably spent just as much time talking about the ads as you have the game. The NFL championship is one of the world’s biggest advertising events, but what if there was a way to ensure audiences only saw the ads they cared about, without all the filler?
Noah Palansky, Taiv
“The goal is to rapidly expand throughout all of the major US markets, and then look at Canada.”
It’s a problem Winnipeg’s Taiv has been solving, and it just earned the company $13 million USD ($17.6 million CAD) in investment.
Taiv’s advertising technology uses AI to detect and replace live television commercials with contextually relevant content chosen by its clientele. Users can have live-television commercial breaks replaced with in-house advertising, filter ads from competitors, and earn partial returns from ad revenue played on their screens.
The company announced the raise on Tuesday. It was led by IDC Ventures and Emerging Ventures, with participation from returning investor Y Combinator and Garage Capital, Pioneer Fund, Trella Ventures, and various undisclosed angel investors also participated.
The raise closed on Dec. 19, nine months after the company’s successful Series A round, which landed them $14.4 million CAD. This latest round brings their total raised capital to over $30 million USD. The company’s valuation is just under $100 million USD ($136 million CAD).
Co-founder and CEO Noah Palansky said interest in the round was broad, with Taiv turning away additional investment and instead prioritizing contributions from companies it had previously worked with, including IDC and Emerging Ventures, which also led its Series A last year.
“We were pretty meaningfully oversubscribed, or we could have been. We turned away a lot of additional investment—probably between five and ten million in additional funds,” he claimed, adding that the company didn’t feel it needed the extra funding as part of this round.
Taiv, which has grown from 30 employees to around 85 in the past year, isn’t calling this round a Series B; instead, it’s labelling it a “Series A plus.” Palansky said that while the company turned away investment, a Series B would seek a much larger amount in the future.
“We would want to raise a lot more capital if we did that, so we kind of decided to do a smaller round before then to double down on growth,” he said.
That growth will include further development of Taiv’s AI models, which currently boast sub-100-millisecond latency for advertisement detection and replacement, as well as a real focus on expanding the company’s footprint in the US, Canada, and elsewhere.
“Really, that goal is to expand nationally. Right now, we’re in quite a few markets in the US—about 25 or so—but we’re not national yet. So the goal is to rapidly expand throughout all of the major US markets, and then look at Canada and other tertiary markets after that.”
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.