AdQuick.com Raises $6M in Series A Funding

AdQuick.com, the Out of Home (OOH) advertising software company, today announced the close of a $6 million series-A funding round, bringing total funding to $9.4M. The round was led by existing investor Initialized Capital with participation from WndrCo, Shrug Capital, The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund and Michael Kassan's MediaLink. This new investment will fuel AdQuick.com's plans to aggressively increase sales, marketing teams and engineering to continue developing advanced analytics, its programmatic capabilities and build out its tech stack for its OOH software.

"We've already reduced the OOH purchasing cycle by 90% and there is huge room for growth in the OOH industry," said Matt O'Connor, CEO and Co-founder, AdQuick.com. "In 2019, 30-35% of OOH inventory was left unsold in the U.S. – not from a lack of demand, but a lack of analytics and a software bridge between suppliers and buyers meaning that the price of OOH campaigns was often based on guesswork. We're creating efficiencies in OOH through technology solutions, and bringing in a new generation of data-driven marketers into OOH for the first time, while creating more effective national campaigns for brands across Retail, B2B, cannabis and DTC. This funding allows us to ramp up our team to meet the demand we are seeing, and continue our mission of building the plumbing and operating system for OOH. We want to create a tighter knit ecosystem so that anyone can easily launch an OOH campaign, with the analytics to boot to grow the entire industry."

An August 2018 industry report from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) stated that OOH is experiencing its greatest growth period in more than a decade. OOH revenue grew 7.7% to nearly $2.7 billion for the second quarter of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018, marking the sector's highest quarterly growth since 2007. For the first half of the year, revenue was up 7%. The growth prospects are also reinforced by research from Magna which noted that OOH will continue to outperform traditional media: +5%, spurred on by Digital OOH (DOOH) which will expand by +17%.

"People can no longer sleep on out of home now that people realize the ROI is competitive (or better) than many overtaxed digital marketing channels. Adquick.com has finally brought the marketplace online," said Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital. "They've done it — the strategy and buying-power of an agency with the efficiency of a tech company."

OOH campaign planning has been an extremely cumbersome process that lacked transparency and the data to make informed decisions. OOH campaigns were locked into the supply that an agency or planner could reach, rather than the full breath of OOH inventory available. AdQuick.com has brought online tools and analytics to offline advertising – making OOH advertising easy, streamlined, transparent, analytical and trackable through a single software for the entire booking process, powered by advanced machine learning, high-touch campaign building technology backed by world-class support. Recent advancements on both the supply and demand side of the industry include:

Launched Campaign Genius, a proprietary campaign planning software powered by machine learning algorithms, allows any marketer to plan an OOH campaign in minutes.
A joint partnership with the Independent Billboard Operators of the USA (IBOUSA) and Apparatix, a leading supply side platform for billboard operators. This is significant because previously it had only been available for digital inventory.
Entered into a partnership with Broadsign, the leading digital out-of-home (DOOH) marketing platform to integrate the AdQuick.com platform with the Broadsign Reach SSP.
"Prior to being introduced to AdQuick.com, I had tried to launch an OOH campaign going through the traditional process. I quickly found out how decentralized and disconnected the industry was. The demographic information and analytics provided by AdQuick.com validated what we were seeing and executing a campaign was light speed compared to before. They made strategic choices and helped us identify the best inventory based on the highest concentration of users based on healthcare plans, which was crucial for us. As a fast growing company, OOH was top of the metrics charts for us. We are targeting millions of potential customers and other mediums don't offer the ROI OOH does." – Shobin Uralil, Co-founder and COO of Lively and AdQuick.com customer.

About AdQuick.com
AdQuick.com is the easiest way to purchase and measure outdoor advertising, and is bringing the OOH industry online. It is the first company to allow anyone to complete the full cycle of booking outdoor ads online, and connects advertisers and agencies to OOH media owners anywhere in the U.S. Founded in 2016, in Los Angeles by former Instacart executives, AdQuick.com's mission is to make OOH advertising more transparent, easier and effective through advanced machine learning-driven, high-touch campaign building technology. Brands such as Turo, Mizzen + Main, Squarespace and Compass among many other next generation marketers use AdQuick.com to make OOH a key part of their marketing-mix. For more information visit www.AdQuick.com. AdQuick.com is currently available in the US, Canada, UK, Germany and Australia.

About Initialized Capital
Initialized is an early stage venture capital firm with $500M under management started by founders, for founders. We know what it's like to start and grow a new company and have helped more founders at the earliest possible stages than most anyone you'll meet. With collective experience in disciplines across the industry – from engineering, product design, and brand marketing to media relations and public policy – we bring relentlessness, fierceness, and agility to VC. For more information visit www.initialized.com