Personalized ads company myThings Ltd. has raised $15 million from Iris Capital, which was joined by Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Deutsche Telekom AG's (DAX: DTE; Pink Sheets: DTEGY) investment arm T-Venture. This is Iris Capital's first investment, just one week after it teamed up with France Télécom SA (Euronext; NYSE: FTE)-Orange and Publicis Groupe SA (Euronext: PUB) to set up a $300 million fund. myThings has raised $37 million to date.
myThings CEO Benny Arbel said that Iris Capital looked at over 100 media companies before investing in them. “We have known Orange for some time. We have worked with them on both mobile and fixed line." He added, "We believe that there is great synergy between their media operations and us."
Arbel said that the round would finance myThings's entry to new markets, including Scandinavia and Latin America, where it plans to open five offices, in addition to its eight current offices. The company currently operates in 14 countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, the US, India, and Japan. The company will also use the financing to develop its advertising technology and for hiring.
myThings, founded in 2005, creates personalized ads in real time via a per-impression basis. The company has sales and marketing teams in eight European countries, Japan and India. Headquartered in London, myThings has 100 employees, including 65 at its R&D center in Tel Aviv, and plans to hire big data and real time bidding personnel.
The company creates more than one billion personalized banners per month, boosting the conversion rates of users who leave e-commerce sites by 150%, compared with corresponding data in retargeting ad data. The company had $10 million revenue in 2010, and much larger revenue in 2011, which brought it to profitability.
Iris Capital's Denis Barrier said, "As strategic partners, we share a vision of driving innovation in the digital media industry, and believe great value creation can be achieved through significant partnerships between myThings and each of our sponsors Orange and Publicis."
Orange's worldwide advertising operations on banners reaches more than 30 million users monthly, and Publicis is the world's third largest ad agency. It is possible that the investment in myThings will lead to further investments in Israeli companies.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 20, 2012
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