NEW YORK & LONDON & SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Grapeshot, the advanced keyword technology provider, announces today the completion of a new funding round, which raises $8.5 million, to further fuel its global expansion.
IQ Capital co-leads the deal alongside Draper Esprit, a member of the global Draper Venture Network. Existing investors IQ Capital Fund I LP and Albion Ventures are also supporting the new round.
The additional investment underpins the accelerated hire of talent to join Grapeshot’s fast growing teams across US, EMEA and APAC markets.
John Snyder, Grapeshot founder and CEO said: “This investment will drive rapid expansion of our presence in New York and Singapore with new office openings in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sydney.
“The programmatic marketplace moves rapidly. Today, the focus is advertising. Tomorrow, brands will optimize their communication mix, media, message and audience, across every channel. We’re perfectly placed to optimize global marketing dollars as our ability to determine context through keywords is a vital signal for understanding consumer behavior. “
“I’m pleased to announce the appointment of Kurt Kratchman as Chief Operating Officer. Kurt has global responsibility for Grapeshot operations and will be based in New York. Kurt brings a wealth of experience, having spent 19 years at C level, including building and selling two businesses, Blast Radius and Schematic, to WPP.”
Kurt Kratchman said: “I’m excited about taking a new technology proposition into the Marketing Communications sector, with a company that is poised for great success, through a compelling combination of a powerful algorithm, great leadership and distinct market identity.”
Stuart Chapman, Founding Partner, Draper Esprit said: “We are delighted to join Grapeshot at this stage. The technology is world class, and with Kurt joining John and the team, this represents a real opportunity to build a global leader in real time, contextual search and analytics. ”
Max Bautin, Managing Partner, IQ Capital said: “We are excited to back Grapeshot with our additional $4m investment. John and the team have built an excellent company that has an outstanding further growth potential globally: Grapeshot stays ahead of competition through continued innovation and seamless execution.”
About Grapeshot
Grapeshot is a New York, London and Singapore based privately owned keyword technology provider that provides audience and keyword targeting and analytics solutions in open and private programmatic environments. Grapeshot builds connections for brands, publishers, buy-side and supply-side partners using an advanced, Internet page, keyword extraction, algorithm. Grapeshot’s core technology and product suite offers a fully customizable, transparent and scalable solution, giving clients simple, integrated control over brand safe targeting. Grapeshot is integrated with all major programmatic trading marketplaces including AppNexus, MediaMath, Turn, and The Trade Desk. Grapeshot receives over 2.5M QPS, 3T classifications per month, recognizing 100+ languages and returning standard and custom segments in 28+ languages and brand specific custom segments, in 100+ recognized languages.
About Draper Esprit:
Draper Esprit is one of Europe’s most experienced venture capital investors, helping entrepreneurs build groundbreaking technology companies. In recent years, Draper Esprit’s exits have generated more than $4 billion in combined enterprise value. Portfolio companies include Movidius, Conversocial, Datahug, EVE (sold to Synopsys), Graze, Greenpeak, Horizon Discovery (IPO on AIM), Icera (sold to Nvidia), LOVEFiLM (sold to Amazon), Lyst, Oxford Immunotec (IPO on NASDAQ), SportPursuit, The Cloud (sold to BSkyB), and Zeus (sold to Riverbed).
Draper Esprit is the exclusive Western European member of the Silicon Valley-based Draper Venture Network with historic investments including Baidu, Skype, Tesla, and other leading innovators.
About IQ Capital:
IQ Capital is a technology focussed venture capital firm with £75m under management, based in Cambridge and London. We invest up to £5m into innovative growth stage technology companies poised to rapidly scale. We also make seed investments into disruptive and IP-rich technology start-ups sourced directly or introduced through our network. We are approachable, straightforward and an extremely well connected team, working together for over 15 years to support founders achieve excellent exits. Our exits include recent trade sales to Google, Apple, Becton Dickinson and Huawei and numerous IPOs including Autonomy. We are currently investing from IQ Capital Fund II (the first “super-ECF” launched in 2015).
