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Adjust raises $227M to measure mobile ads and prevent fraud
Adjust is announcing that it has raised $227 million in new funding.
The company, founded in Berlin back in 2012, has created a variety of ad measurement and anti-fraud tools — CEO Christian Henschel said the goal is to “make marketing simpler, smarter and safer.” Adjust says it’s now being used in more than 25,000 mobile apps for customers like NBCUniversal, Zynga, Robinhood, Pinterest and Procter & Gamble.
It’s been nearly four years since the company raised its previous round of $15 million. Henschel (pictured above with his co-founder and CTO Paul Müller) told me the company was already profitable back then, and it’s continued to be profitable while growing revenue by an average of 80 percent every year. So it raised more money (a lot more), he said, “because we saw the opportunity … to grow our business even further.”
Henschel pointed to three broad areas where Adjust is planning to invest and grow. First, there’s combating fraud, where he said the company was “very early,” first launching its mobile fraud prevention suite in 2016. It expanded its offerings earlier this year with the acquisition of Unbotify.
Second, he said Adjust will continue to invest in automation and aggregation — an area where it made another recent acquisition, namely the data aggregation company Acquired.io.
“We’re giving our customers the ability to get rid of the repetitive and boring tasks and really focus them back on thigns that human beings are very good at — that is creativity,” Henschel said.
Lastly, the company (which already has 350 employees in 15 offices worldwide) will continue to invest in customer service and geographic expansion, particularly in Asia.
Speaking of acquisitions, Adjust says it’s also partnered with Japanese marketing agency Adways and acquired Adways’ attribution tool PartyTrack. So naturally, you might assume that this new capital means even more deals are in the works, but Henschel said, “Acquisitions are always tough — it’s hard to find the right companies, and even harder to integrate them.”
In other words, he’s open to acquiring more companies, but he said, “We don’t have any plans right now.”
This new round brings Adjust’s total funding to $250 million. It was led by Eurazeo Growth, Highland Europe, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners and Sofina.
“Adjust reached profitability just three years after its creation, and has seen extraordinary growth since then,” said Eurazeo Growth’s Yann du Rusquec in a statement. “The company is ideally positioned to further expand its product and footprint throughout 2019 and beyond, cementing its position as one of the most successful global tech champions to come out of Europe.”
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Adjust expands its anti-ad fraud tech by acquiring Unbotify
Adjust, a Berlin-headquartered company focused on mobile ad measurement and fraud prevention, is acquiring bot detection startup Unbotify.
Founded in 2012, Adjust has become increasingly focused on ad fraud, and in fact created an industry group called the Coalition Against Ad Fraud a little over a year ago. Co-founder and CTO Paul Müller argued that although the industry has become increasingly concerned about fraud, Adjust has led the way in taking a more proactive approach: “Instead of just telling our clients, ‘Hey, you just spent money on fraud,’ we actively intervened and rejected attribution to a fraudulent source.”
In Müller’s view, Unbotify fits in with the company’s broader philosophy because the Israeli startup isn’t just trying to detect bots — it also “produces explainable results,” providing a clear explanation of why an impression couldn’t have come from a real human being.
“We strongly believe fraud isn’t a problem that can be solved with a magical black box or eight ball,” he said. “Fraud should not be an opinion. We believe in clear, transparent measurement of why something is fraud.”
Adjust co-founder and CEO Christian Henschel said the entire 25-person Unbotify team will be joining the company, and will continue working as an independent office in Tel Aviv. In fact, Adjust plans to double the size of the team by the end of the year.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Unbotify was founded in 2015 by Yaron Oliker and Alon Dayan. According to Crunchbase, it raised $2 million in funding from Maverick Ventures Israel.
Ultimately, Henschel said, “What we’d like to achieve is to end fraud for digital media.”
Not that they think that Adjust alone can put a stop to all fraud. Instead, they hope to simply make it too costly and difficult for fraudsters to target Adjust customers.
“If you have a lot of houses on the street, and some of the doors are heavily fortified, most of the time [the thieves] will go with the door leaning open,” Müller said. “For us, the goal is not to eliminate fraud on an idealistic level, but actually to make it financially unviable.”
The announcement comes just a month after Adjust announced it was buying data aggregation company Acquired.io.
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Hot on the heels of raising a new $379 million fund aimed at startups at the growth stage, Highland Europe has led a $17 million round in mobile app intelligence and analytics startup Adjust. This brings total funding since being founded in 2012 to $30 million.