He started his company in a basement. Now it’s worth over a hundred million dollars

Glispa CEO Gary Lin

No one really enjoys those pesky ads or in-app notifications which pop up sporadically on our phones, but it’s currently a US$100 billion business opportunity.

In fact, it’s predicted that advertising spend on mobile phones will account for over 70 percent of all digital marketing budgets, reaching a colossal US$195.5 billion by 2019.

And it’s not difficult to see why. Smartphones already account for a higher slice of ecommerce traffic than computers, with the proportion expected to rise to 60 percent by the end of 2017.

Gary Lin accurately predicted these trends around a decade ago. He started ad tech firm Glispa in 2008 with the intention to optimize digital advertising by making it easier for developers to acquire new users and keep them engaged.

Gary’s not really a fan of VC-fueled businesses.

Gary started out with web-based ad solutions, but the team recognized early on that mobile traffic would be the future of advertising. It helped that the startup generated revenue from an early stage and was quietly able to expand its team until it grew into a digital marketing behemoth.

The Berlin-headquartered company now has 250 employees in eight offices across the world, including Singapore, Tel Aviv, Beijing, and Bangalore. But it started in the basement of a generic building in the German capital.

Along the way, it’s helped tech giants like Alibaba, OLX, Foodpanda, Tiket, Bukalapak, and Tokopedia.

“Glispa helped Tiket acquire high-quality mobile users and increase engagement for travel bookings,” explains Gary of the Indonesian startup. “Tiket wanted to improve mobile app growth and sought to secure additional visibility for their Android app.”.

In 2015, Glispa accounted for approximately 400 billion ad impressions, reaching 1 billion active users every month.

Photo credit: olegdudko / 123RF.

No VC funding

The mind-boggling corollary to Glispa’s meteoric rise is that it’s never accepted any external funding. It sold a 75 percent stake to Market Tech, a UK-based firm, last year for US$77 million but that remains its sole investment round. Till then the company was entirely bootstrapped.

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