A company which builds products to increase the success of app marketing has secured £170,000 from Greater London Investment Fund (GLIF), backed by the government’s Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS).
The funding will be used to scale up their staff team by creating six new positions in their London head office and will enable the company to focus on their marketing activity throughout 2022.
Machine Advertising started life as a tech solution to help brands optimise their return on advertising spend. The technology was built inhouse and additional tools were added, including a fraud detection tool. The fraud detection aspect of the software has been hugely successful. When they ran one of their larger global client’s campaigns through their fraud tool, 92% of app installs were found to be fraudulent. At this point they pivoted their business towards further developing the fraud tool.
Clients run their campaigns through Machine Advertising’s platform which checks 25 billion data points every month. These checks are designed to detect whether marketing is reaching the intended audience or whether fraudsters are using bots, or domain spoofing, to siphon off money from advertising transactions.
Gary Danks, CEO at Machine Advertising said: “Growing our team is an exciting step for us, as it will enable us to increase our marketing reach and welcome new clients to the Machine Advertising portfolio. Our existing clients are from a breadth of sectors, from travel to advertising. But for all their differences each of them need transparency when it comes to successfully spending their marketing budget. Our products facilitate this by protecting ad campaigns from fraudulent attacks. We’re very much looking forward to building our team so that we can work with the next round of clients, our thanks to Paul at The FSE Group for facilitating the funding that will enable this.”
Paul Shadbolt, Investment Manager for The FSE Group, which manages the £55 million GLIF debt fund on behalf of Funding London, added: “Machine Advertising is a perfect example of a company who has successfully amended their focus to take on board their strengths, rather than missing exciting opportunities. This foresight and drive impressed us, along with winning the Business of Apps Top Ad Fraud Prevention Tool in 2020 and being named the Most Effective Anti Fraud Solution at the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. We wish Gary and his team all the very best for the future.”
Maggie Rodriguez-Piza, CEO at Funding London, added, “Gary and his team have built an innovative product which delivers great value to its users. Pivoting the business has helped them go from strength to strength. We are delighted that GLIF’s capital will underpin Machine Advertising’s team expansion and support their growth ambitions.”
GLIF is a £100m initiative to help address the SME finance gap in Greater London, promoting economic growth through enterprise and an inclusive and sustainable economy. £55m of debt funding is available, via loans between £100,000 and £1m, to early-stage and established SMEs looking to scale-up and realise their growth ambitions. GLIF is financed through the European Investment Bank (EIB), European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), London Waste & recycling Board (LWARB) and Funding London’s Legacies.