Insider Brief
- Topsort, an AI and machine learning-based tech company, raised $20 million in Series A funding to scale its advertising platform that avoids third-party cookies and prioritizes privacy, aiming for a market valuation of $150 million.
- The company’s platform seeks to democratize auction-based advertising technology, providing a privacy-compliant, AI-powered solution for enterprise-level customers and a transparent, efficient ad model for retailers and marketplaces.
- Founded in 2021 by a team including a former beauty brand seller, a serial entrepreneur, and a Stanford professor, Topsort has quickly gained the trust of major brands and retailers, aiming to revolutionize clean advertising in the post-cookie era.
PRESS RELEASE — SAN FRANCISCO/March 4, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Artificial intelligence and machine learning-based technology company, Topsort, today announces that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Upload Ventures and returning seed round investors, Quiet Capital and Pear Ventures. The Series A round sees the company valued at $150 million.
Topsort will use this round of funding to further scale its clean advertising platform that’s free of creepy third-party cookie tracking and privacy-invasive data — a significant departure from the advertising world of yesterday and a leap towards democratizing the same kind of auction-based advertising that garnered massive profits for giants like Google and Amazon. As the industry closes the chapter on third-party cookies, Topsort’s platform serves as the connective tissue for the post-cookie world of ads that doesn’t work around the privacy issue, but solves it entirely for enterprise-level customers.
The Topsort platform is fueled by similar AI and ML models that power platforms in the 2020s AI revolution. Essentially a large “prediction machine”, Topsort works on a self-learning algorithm, using human feedback to maintain a constant state of improvement. Unlike copycat ad tech companies, Topsort:
- Empowers Retailers and Marketplaces: Through its retail media platform and customizable APIs, Topsort enables retailers and marketplaces to run effective ad campaigns with high returns.
- Provides a Clean Replacement of Cookies: The commerce and media-focused, easy-to-use clean room is one-of-a-kind, encrypted technology with zero-visibility into privacy data — not even Topsort can see it.
- Brings Transparency to Retail Media Buying: Topsort offers 1-click sponsored listings across onsite searches with total return on advertising spend (ROAS) control. This enables retailers and brands to uncover valuable insights while respecting privacy with compliant, anonymous data matching.
Founded in 2021, Topsort is led by CEO and co-founder Regina Ye, a former beauty brand seller turned advertising disruptor, CTO and co-founder Francisco Larrain, a serial entrepreneur who had two exits including one from Groupon and led its engineering in its heyday, and co-founder and Chief Scientist, Michael Ostrovsky, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a world-renowned economist on auction theory, game theory, and marketplace design.
“This funding round is further fueling our mission to accelerate the clean advertising revolution using AI and new age machine learning technology. Only one part of what’s to come is the democratization of auction-based advertising technology into Bidless formats, which previously had a much higher bar of entry and amassed an insane amount of profit for some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley,” said Topsort CEO and co-founder Regina Ye. “With Topsort, we hope to democratize the access to KPI-driven, efficient and transparent media in the new age of post-cookies to both enterprise retailers, top brands and agencies, as well as small, long-tail sellers alike. Advertisers of all shapes and sizes can benefit from a highly profitable ad business that works for everyone within the ecosystem.”
Since its inception just a few years ago, Topsort has earned the trust of major retailers, marketplaces and brands, including Poshmark, Cencosud, Unilever, Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, General Mills, Glovo (part of Delivery Hero), Phillips and many more. It previously raised $8.6 million in a seed round in 2022.
About Topsort
Topsort is the connective tissue for the post-cookie era of clean advertising, by offering a world class retail media technology stack with the most nimble integration and flexibility, clean room that is truly clean with attribution and incrementality measurements, and an ad network product. Companies like Google and Amazon have been making huge advertising profits from auction-based technology for decades, yet it’s not been available to third parties and now Topsort makes it plug-and-play with full flexibility to catch up all in the context of zero cookie data dependency. For more information visit: https://www.topsort.com/.
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