Social mobile advertising firm, LoopMe, has announced the closure of a $3 million funding round that will be used for expansion in the US and Asia.
LoopMe employs 30 people from its headquarters in London and plans to accelerate recruitment on a global level. The company will also be using the cash to develop its proprietary artificial intelligence and social discovery technology.
Ads on LoopMe’s platform differ from regular display advertising by giving consumers the option to like, dislike, stop, share, tweet or comment on media. By offering social endorsement and feedback, LoopMe allows others to discover ads on mobile devices.
Advertising accountability
By adding social assets to ads, co-founder and CEO of LoopMe, Stephen Upstone, wants to not only making brands more accountable for their campaigns, but give them real-world feedback of their performance.
“People love to share video and content on mobile devices and advertising can be like other content – shareable, findable and rateable,” Upstone said. “We are enabling consumers to share and rate adverts, games and the products that they represent.”
The two latest investors of LoopMe, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Open Ocean Capital, bring experience of backing companies such as Zalando and Wooga along with technologies such as MySQL.
Mobile ad disruption
Having already experienced strong revenue growth globally as well as profitability, Barbod Namini of Holtzbrinck Ventures believes that LoopMe can now concentrate its efforts on giving advertisers a socially responsive marketing option.
“With a tremendous global reach of shareable rich media and video ads and big data artificial intelligence capabilities, LoopMe is set to disrupt the mobile advertising landscape and completely redefine the way end users socially engage with ads,” Namini said.
At the beginning of last year, LoopMe successfully secured itself $500k from a consortium of super angels and venture capitalists that included Ballpark Ventures, Reuters Venture Capital, Ciklum and AdQuota.