DoubleVerify will Spend $125 Million to Acquire an AI AdTech Company

The AI adtech industry is all set for a new journey. Leading digital adtech and analytics firm, DoubleVerify will acquire an AI-powered digital campaign optimization technology provider, Scibids. How much is DoubleVerify paying to acquire Scibids?

$125 million.

This mega adtech transaction involving AI technologies is anticipated to close in the third quarter.

How would Scibids’ acquisition impact the AI Adtech landscape?

In the era of generative AI, customers seek better campaign optimization solutions to improve their media quality and performance data management. DoubleVerify would leverage AI Adtech capabilities of Scibids to improve real-time optimizations and activations of digital campaigns. The two companies will join forces to combine their existing expertise in trusted media quality and performance data that includes viewability, contextual and attention signals. Scibids’ proven AI technology and real-time optimization algorithms would enable DoubleVerify to provide advertisers real-time campaign optimization, without the use of third-party cookies.

DV’s combination with Scibids is a marriage of two best-in-breed, objective platforms – both of which are ad-server and media agnostic – offering advertisers trusted data and AI technology to help them maximize their digital investments.

How AI at Scibids works?

I had interviewed Scibids’ CEO in 2021. At that time, we were informed that Scibids is an aggressive AI innovation company with laser-focused approach to transform the post-COVID digital adtech ecosystem with world-class machine learning capabilities. The CEO had then told me, “We try to build an environment where they will absolutely thrive, by promoting excellence, rigor, ownership, and collaboration in every decision we make. A well-known Silicon Valley motto states that the best tech companies hire “10x” engineers who can bring 10 times more value to their company than the average. At Scibids, we have the ambition that every Scibidsian becomes a “10x” AI specialist, building the Scibids team to be a “100x” team!”

Fast-forward to 2023, we now know that Scibids builds AI that automates and optimizes an advertiser’s programmatic buying of digital ad campaigns.Scibids AI algorithms tracks DSP impressions, price points, first party data and measurement data to generate custom bidding reports for clients. These help client to align their digital campaigns with an advertiser’s KPIs matching their desired outcomes. This AI approach already benefits world-class brands such as Dell, Spotify and Allianz. Recently, Scibids had partnered with Google Display and Video 360 to expand their AI offerings to the adtech marketplace.

At the time of this announcement, Mark Zagorski, DoubleVerify CEO shared an official statement with AiThority.com’s editorial desk.

Mark said, “The acquisition of Scibids is a decisive step in our journey to power superior campaign outcomes that started with developing and delivering the industry standard in media quality insights and has evolved into putting that data to work for advertisers. The combination marries DV’s proprietary data with Scibids’ AI-powered optimization technology, letting us empower brands with unparalleled insights and control over their advertising performance.”

His counterpart at Scibids, Remi Lemonnier shared his excitement with us. Remi, who is also a co-founder in the company, said, “DoubleVerify is a company that shares our commitment to independence, innovation and maximizing media performance, and we’re thrilled to take our partnership to the next level. This partnership will amplify the capabilities of our customizable AI technology and expand its impact across the digital advertising ecosystem to strengthen the open web. We look forward to working with the entire DV team to deliver new opportunities and maximize campaign outcomes for our global advertisers and partners.”

The acquisition will provide advertisers with multiple benefits including:

• Maximize business outcomes and ROI across all addressable paid media bought programmatically, by incorporating DV’s granular metrics in multidimensional dynamic optimization.
• Ensure continuous optimization through the integration of DV’s impression-level media quality and performance data, and Scibids’ proprietary AI technology in optimization algorithms.
• Streamline manual efforts and drive operational efficiencies by employing automated bidding across leading DSPs, including Google’s DV360, The Trade Desk, and Xandr, to name a few.

The momentum is behind DV’s growth this year. DV had partnered with Scibids to launch its adtech offering DV Algorithmic Optimizer. This platform uses customizable AI algorithm to measure the performance of attention metrics. Using DV Algorithmic Optimizer, brands could generate a lift of 63% increase in attention levels and a 95% increase in impressions won across several digital campaigns.

The acquisition will expand DV’s ability to deliver real-time campaign optimizations leveraging its comprehensive media quality and performance data. Most importantly, DoubleVerify can now position itself as a leading AI-powered Adtech player that guarantees actual ad KPI achievement and tangible business outcome to digital advertisers.

“The acquisition lets us redefine the verification space and offer a continuous feedback loop between activation, measurement and optimization – powered by AI technology and the most trusted impression-level media quality and verification data in the space,” added DV’s CEO.