College dropouts to global entrepreneurs: AdPushup gets Geniee muscle to push into Southeast Asia

Atul Agarwal and Ankit Oberoi, co-founders of AdPushUp.

I dread visiting many of India’s popular news sites [not naming any because of obvious reasons]. I go to them only when I absolutely have to – and that’s not always because the site has bad or irrelevant content. It’s because I hate the immediate onslaught of ads that hits me as soon as I open an article. There are ad slots placed all over the page and many of the videos start playing automatically. And for this reason alone, I never linger on the site to read more articles after rushing through the one I came in for.

The obvious solution, adblocking, is bad business for the publishers, as it’s the ads that are raking in the moolah for them. But advertisers are not really getting any bang for their bucks as readers browsing through these pages have not only developed blindness to the ads but are also annoyed by them. Is there an intelligent way to crack this? That’s the question that led two college dropouts – Ankit Oberoi and Atul Agarwal – to start AdPushup two years ago.

They have a patent-pending algorithm that optimizes the ad layout for the publishers by testing the placement, size, and type of ad unit on a web page. “Using this, we help fight banner blindness, improve click-through rates (CTR) for publishers, and increase ad revenues,” Ankit told Tech in Asia. It’s a simple plug-and-­­play integration for the publishers.

Today, AdPushup announced an undisclosed amount of series A funding from Japan’s Geniee and Chicago’s Purvi Capital.

AdPushup will be expanding to Japan and Southeast Asia as it has inked a strategic partnership with Geniee. Geniee works with some of the largest publishers in Japan and processes more than 60 billion impressions monthly. “Our product will be integrated in their solution allowing all of their publishers to benefit from our technology,” Ankit said. His co-founder Atul added: “This partnership with Geniee will allow us to reach a wider audience with sustainable ad revenue uplift.”

According to a statement from Geniee, AdPushup’s ad revenue optimization product “being integrated in this alliance is intended to boost display ad revenues by using machine learning to optimize the layout, size, and type of ad in the ad space to suit each individual website visitor.”

SoftBank is the majority shareholder in Geniee.

Image credit: AdPushup.

Big strides, fast

Tech in Asia first wrote about AdPushup two years ago. They were in the process of honing the algorithm that figures out optimal ad layouts. Here are the noteworthy updates since then that Ankit shared:

• Launched its beta live in early 2015.
• Found product/market fit in August, 2015.
• Started monetization experiments in September, 2015.
• Started generating revenue by November, 2015.

Along the way, the Indian startup incorporated in Delaware in the US as well. “Currently, the revenue is growing at 25 percent month-on-month and the company has almost hit profitability,” Ankit said. So far, the company has achieved an average revenue optimization of 69 percent for over 400 web publishers in India and the US, Geniee said in a statement, explaining the purpose of its investment.

Some of AdPushup’s important clients in India are news site The Logical Indian, smartphone price comparison site MySmartPrice, and local information service AskLaila. According to Ankit, most of AdPushup’s clients have been coming through inbound marketing for which they use an active blog.