Adtech startup from Japan raises series D funding to enter China, India

Mild temperatures may have kept residents of the Japanese capital from experiencing a rare white Christmas, but for Tokyo-based Geniee, it ended up being a green Christmas. The adtech startup, founded in 2010, raised an undisclosed amount of series D funding from Fenox Venture Capital over the holiday weekend.

Geniee co-founder and CEO Tomoaki Kudo (pictured above) tells Tech in Asia that the investment will be used to further its expansion across Asia. Geniee already operates subsidiaries in Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam – along with joint ventures in Thailand and Malaysia. By the end of 2016, the startup plans to have a presence in China, India, and Taiwan.

“We often do business with strong local players, so we’ll be looking for partners in each of those countries,” Tomoaki says.

The CEO declined to share the exact amount raised, but a source with direct knowledge of the situation says it’s in the seven-figure USD range. The CEO described the investment as a “pre-IPO” round and says his team is gearing up for an exit.

“Expanding our business is more important [than an IPO], but we’ll likely go public in the near future,” he says.

Geniee’s ad platform is based on real-time bidding (RTB), an industry term for the buying and selling of online advertising impressions via auctions that occur in fractions of a second. RTB allows advertisers to target specific demographics or geographical locations, thus ensuring that impressions aren’t wasted on irrelevant audiences. It’s also cheaper and less time-consuming than hiring a team of human ad buyers.

Including its Southeast Asian subsidiaries, Geniee’s advertising platform generates 50 billion impressions a month.

See: This Japanese startup handles over 1 trillion bid requests every month

Adtech isn’t an exciting vertical for the average consumer; in fact, many people will go to great lengths to avoid online ads whenever possible (it’s also excruciatingly full of acronyms). It is, however, an attractive investment target for its potential to make big bucks. RTB-based adtech company FreakOut IPO’d on the Japanese stock exchange in June this year after raising US$1.5 million from GMO way back in 2012. At that time, FreakOut claimed to be Japan’s largest demand-side platform (DSP), whereas Geniee claims to be the country’s top supply-side platform (SSP).

The difference is hard to grasp unless you’re in the digital advertising world – in the plainest terms possible, an SSP is the publisher equivalent of a DSP. Marketers use DSPs to buy ad impressions from online exchanges as cheaply as possible, whereas SSPs are designed by publishers themselves in order to sell impressions for the highest possible price. Geniee offers both platforms.

Adblocking has become a controversial topic since Apple announced that its latest iOS would support the feature in September. Many websites, especially media sites, rely on ads to keep their businesses afloat. It’s unclear how much of an affect adblocking has – or could have – on Geniee, and Tomoaki didn’t reply when asked to comment on the issue specifically. We’ll update this post if we hear back from him.

Geniee raised an undisclosed amount of funding from SoftBank in October 2014, entering into a business alliance with the telco as well. The startup also attracted an undisclosed amount of funding from Yahoo Japan, Transcosmos, and OPT in 2013. It additionally raised roughly US$1 million from Gree Ventures in 2012, and US$700,000 from Global Brain in 2011.

This past summer, Geniee itself invested in Singapore-based adtech startup Adskom.