AdAsia previously raised US$12 million in April this year

Singapore-based adtech startup AdAsia Holdings has raised US$2.5 million in funding from Hisanori Watanabe, the former CEO and president of Japanese information marketplace WebCrew; and Japanese news provider Gunosy. This closes AdAsia’s Series A round.

The programmatic advertising company, which allows companies to use software to buy digital advertising, raised its first portion of Series A funding — US$12 million — in April this year from JAFCO Asia, a regional subsidiary of global venture capital firm JAFCO Co., Ltd.

With the new injection of financing, AdAsia plans to scale its AI-matching engine, which was first developed for influencer marketing platform CastingAsia, to other industries beyond marketing and advertising — such as human resources. It wants to help these companies match candidates to companies using AI tech.

“The plan is to roll out a suite of across multiple aspects – providing professionals, businesses and industries with multiple tools in their arsenal for greater work effectiveness,” said Kozutsumi, COO and co-founder of AdAsia Holdings.

“We also want to enable ‘business discovery’. With companies possessing and processing large amounts of data today, the next step is to utilise AI to understand this data, discover what was not readily apparent and quickly act on it. This has been the concept behind programmatic advertising, and we want to scale this expertise across industries and job functions,” he added.

Gunosy’s investment will also allow AdAsia to tap into its mobile advertising units and bring them to Southeast Asia.

Also Read: AdAsia Holdings appoints new VP for Taiwan, further strengthening global expansion move

“Bringing both Watanabe and Gunosy onboard at this point of the company’s growth were strategic moves, providing us access to experienced counsel and further business opportunities,” said Kosuke Sogo, CEO and Co-founder of AdAsia.

AdAsia said that its AI-matching engine consists of several components, such as image recognition and NLP, deep learning and scraping.

Founded in 2016, AdAsia has offices in 10 offices in nine countries. It recently expanded to Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City and Tokyo. The company has over 300 clients globally, and claimed to have generated US$12.9 million in 2016 and is already operating at a profit.

Additionally, it claimed that it is seeing an average of 30 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase in revenue for 2017. Currently, AdAsia has a staff count of 170.

In a previous interview with e27, Sogo said he has plans to list AdAsia on either the Hong Kong or Tokyo stock exchange in late-2018 or early-2019. He also plans to grow the company to 400 employees.

AdAsia will also seek to grow its product development centre in Ho Chi Minh City. It wants to include an R&D unit to oversee the AI tech.

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Image Credit: AdAsia

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