Gustav Von Sydow, Burt CEO, Discusses The Company's Recent Fund Raise, Product Development And How It Is Differentiating From Similar Offerings On The European Market
Can you give some overview on the latest funding round? And on what areas will you be allocating the new raise? Development? Sales resource?
We raised a $3M round, chosing Industrifonden (www.industrifonden.se) as our lead investor, based on their experience from funding and building QlikTech (a Swedish analytics/BI software company) to their recent IPO, valued at almost $3B.
Most of the investment goes straight to the continuous development of an amazing product suite, and the rest goes to building an organization capable of on-boarding the agencies, advertisers and publishers we already have in the pipeline.
Are you looking to move into other markets? Will you be opening a London office to service the big agency groups?
In the last 6 months Burt has grown from 5 people to almost 30, and we’re planning to add another 15-20 people later this year. Many of these hires will be based in new markets, such as the UK.
However, since our core product is both easy to understand, simple to implement and self-service to use, at this stage we don’t view local presence as a requirement to close deals. Rather we see local presence as a great way to educate the market and get quick feedback to guide our product development.
For those unfamiliar with Burt, what are key areas of the eco-system is your analytics offering addressing?
Burt started out building products for making personalized ads, but now we’re putting most of our resources behind Rich, a web analytics platform focused on advertising (not e-commerce).
We’re building Rich based on the insight that online media is the first advertising channel impossible to understand by intution alone – it’s just too many types of content, being consumed in too many ways, in too many different contexts.
Rich provides more transparency into the actual environment where ads are being inserted, a fundamental aspect that most online advertisers, agencies and even publishers actually know very little about. For instance, we analyze and report on which pages ads are being shown, how many ads appear on each page, how long they’re placed in-view and what type of design works in what situation.
The result is a set of “currencies” (for instance, “space” and “time”) that not only make it more obvious for advertisers what a display ad actually means, but it also makes online comparable with print and TV from a technical perspective. Based on the same data set, media owners gain insights for how to improve the design of their sites and data to better package their inventory, and creative agencies gain visibility into the context they’re working with, resulting in campaigns more aligned with their surroundings.
Will we see new developments from Burt like the Rich for Advertisers/Agencies (RFA)?
We’re in the process of rolling out a massive update for Rich, with apps for advertisers/agencies/networks/publishers running on the same platform. Naturally, the user experience varies by segment but the data set and core technology remains the same, allowing us to increase the pace at which we develop and deploy new features.
The update will also mark the public launch of Rich for Media (RFM), our web analytics product for media owners. With RFM, we’re hoping to close the massive information gap between publisher ad serving reports and web site analytics.
We’ve never seen more enthusiasm from pilot customers for anything that we’ve built, so we’re really looking forward to see how RFM is received by a wider audience.
How is Burt differentiating itself form all the other DMP/Ad Verification offerings on the European market?
Our customers on the advertiser/agency/network side tell us they prefer using Rich because it’s:
1) Quick to install
2) Easy to understand, and
3) Contains unique insights about the media and creative.
At this stage it is our belief that the first two points are the most important, given that users have other stuff to do in the day than learn how to use our tools, and that our main competitors in 99% of the cases are Excel dumps from the ad servers, rather than other analytics companies.
As for DMPs, I’m a big fan of the concept but we don’t view ourselves as one yet since we “only” focus on display ads – even if our definition includes video, “mobile”, widgets etc.
However, we do compete with DMPs when it comes to helping publishers make sense of their advertising business. In this situation, a critical difference is that we bring our own data set to the table, by capturing high resolution information on users, pageviews, content, impressions, clickstreams etc. The thing is, even if a DMP ties together site analytics, ad serving and ad verification, you’re still missing out on so much critical data because:
1) The data just isn’t being collected in the first place, and
2) The data set is too complex/big to be portable from one system to another without seriously compromising depth/performance
Sure, site analytics tracks pageviews, ad servers count impressions and ad verification analyze if they’re in-screen. You’d think that what you get is to analyze which impression was placed in-screen on what page, with how many other ads and to what price. But that’s just not happening, and that’s the kind of thing we do.
All it takes is a cut-and-paste script to get started.
As a European ad tech company, would you say it’s been difficult raising money for expansion?
Fundraising is never easy if you want it on good terms. But given that you have a great team, interesting core technology and an exciting opportunity, raising seed money for finding product/market fit or getting expansion capital to ramp a proven business model shouldn’t be more difficult in Europe than it is in the US.
However, in my experience there is a big gap in European venture capital when it comes to the early stage between seed and expansion, when you typically want to to raise funding for finding a scalable business model and streamline your product.
In some markets (mostly consumer plays in gaming, social media etc.) you can often skip straight from seed to expansion, but in complex B2B markets requiring large upfronts (such as advertising technology), I think that many startups would benefit from having additional runway for improving their distribution, pricing, user experience and stability.
Naturally, I’m happy that Burt is one of the few companies that now have this opportunity and we’re working hard to make the most of it!
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