IRIS.TV, the leading video data platform, announced the completion of a $18 million Series B funding round. Intel Capital, a division of Intel Corporation, led the round, with participation from investors including WISE Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, and Mirae Asset Venture Investment. The round also included prominent leaders in the space including Mike Baker, founder, CEO of dataxu (acquired by Roku in 2019), Mike Shehan, founder, CEO of video advertising platform SpotX (merging with Magnite in 2021), and Ari Paparo, CEO of ad tech innovator Beeswax (acquired by Comcast in 2020). The new round of investment will enable IRIS.TV to accelerate the growth of its video data platform, and API tools that enable video-level data targeting for Connected TV (CTV) and online video.
IRIS.TV was founded in 2013 by CEO Field Garthwaite and COO Richie Hyden to help major media companies harness the power of machine learning and video data connectivity to build profitable video businesses online. For an industry struggling to untangle the challenges of brand safety, fraud, and transparency in the CTV and online video marketplaces, IRIS.TV provides video-level transparency by connecting media companies’ video data with trusted third-party verification partners and the advertising and marketing technology ecosystem in a privacy-first, neutral, and secure way. This allows for every video play, in every format and device, to be relevant, brand-safe, and measurable.
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IRIS.TV’s video data platform simplifies the complexity and fragmentation of the video and CTV ecosystem by connecting and unifying video data from any source to power better consumer experiences and drive business outcomes. Before IRIS.TV, contextual and brand-safety data for videos was only available by analyzing the text on a web page–and was an impossibility for connected TV. Now, for the first time, marketers can “think inside the video” with the transparency to confidently buy CTV and premium video inventory based on video-level contextual and brand-safety analysis of the specific topical nature of every video. There are thousands of “IRIS-enabled” premium publishers around the world with over 300 billion annual views and growing rapidly.
“IRIS.TV is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the tremendous growth in online video viewership and the attendant need for brands and publishers to better monetize existing content in a Connected TV world,” said Marcelino Ford-Livene, Managing Director, Intel Capital. “We are excited to be involved in IRIS.TV’s rapid growth in this emerging sector.”
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Connected TV experienced tremendous growth in 2020, as Leichtman Research Group estimated that four in five U.S. homes have at least one CTV device. While viewers flocked to CTV as a result of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, advertisers were reticent to increase spending proportionally due to a lack of transparency and no data filters. IRIS.TV’s video data platform connects all video data at the video-level from any source to the digital advertising ecosystem for analysis, segmentation, and activation by third parties such as Oracle Data Cloud, Comscore, GumGum, ZEFR, Advanced Contextual, and Silverbullet.
“We are thrilled to have Intel Capital as an investor, which will allow us to build the data infrastructure for the future of video and Connected TV,” said Field Garthwaite, CEO of IRIS.TV. “This investment will allow IRIS.TV to expand operations with a focus on three key areas of growth. First, we’re looking to continue hiring world class talent and developers. Second, we will be expanding our strategic partnerships across the ecosystem to enable marketers and advertisers to utilize video-level data to achieve their business goals. Lastly, we will be investing in new API’s and features to provide the tools publishers, ad platforms, and marketers need to successfully invest in the fast-growing Connected TV space.”
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