Japanese VC Global Brain joins Telstra, Sequoia, and Canaan in AdNear’s $19M series B funding

Indian startup AdNear, which provides location-based intelligence for advertising, has just raised US$19 million in series B funding. What is significant is that a leading Japanese venture capital firm, Global Brain, and the VC arm of Australian telecom giant Telstra have come on board, joining existing investors Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners in this round.

AdNear, which started in Bangalore but is now headquartered in Singapore, has taken its unique adtech model across Southeast Asia, Australia, and most recently, Japan. Global Brain’s growth hack assistance using its extensive network will be vital in bringing large Japanese corporations on to the AdNear client base, which already includes marquee global brands like P&G, Unilever, BMW, Audi, Ford, Samsung, IKEA, and Adidas.

Anil Mathews, founder and CEO of AdNear, explains to Tech in Asia why they went for Global Brain as an investor:

During this round, we were not looking for pure venture capital firms to partner with as we already have Sequoia and Canaan on board. Our focus was a strategic investor who could add value to our business. Global brain fits perfectly considering they are also helping us establish a new market. The Japanese culture is unique, and we had to keep that in mind – Global Brain’s local partnerships and expertise are vital to the success of an international entrant like AdNear to the Japanese market.

Yasuhiko Yurimoto, president and CEO of Global Brain Corp, said in a statement, “We appreciated AdNear’s superior technologies and highly experienced team, and firmly believe that AdNear will become a leading player in the global adtech market in the near future.”

AdNear uses geo-location and other data points for intelligent targeting of ads across mobile devices. What differentiates this company from others in the mobile ad tech space is its use of real world data collected by matching mobile signals with geo-location points. This is an additional layer on top of virtual data from online behavior (which is what traditional ad companies use to sketch a user’s profile).

AdNear has billions of location reference points mapped, which they call their ‘geographical layer’. That includes the latitude-longitude of a mobile user as well as what’s in the user’s vicinity: like a hospital or how many coffee shops. That data is AdNear’s strength.

For instance, if an adtech company spots you using chat apps frequently, it assumes you are likely to fall in the 18-24 age bracket. But these days a lot of older people use chat apps too. So, to improve the predictability and profiling, AdNear adds real world data on top of the virtual data. For example, where you have been spending most of your time over the last 30/60/90 days can tell a lot about you. If you are seen within a university campus from 9am to 5pm every working day, then the probability of you being a student is very high.

AdNear closed its series A round of funding of US$6.3 million from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners in 2012. Since then, it has been adding about 1.2 million user profiles every day to its database.

When we met Anil Mathews, founder and CEO of AdNear, at his Bangalore office, he could barely contain his excitement about how his company had taken off into the stratosphere. “You see, the user profiles we have aren’t generic. Each one of them is a user to whom we have assigned a unique ID, about whom we have basic information like gender to deeper details like whether she or he is a frequent traveler, a student or a housewife,” he told us. That’s a gold mine of data for them to tap for their value proposition to premium brands – Audi, Google, Samsung, and so on. What they offer to these companies is a more effective, targeted ad campaign, instead of the traditional blind, blanket ads that get a small fraction of the response that AdNear can.