This funding round elevates Topsort’s mission to accelerate the clean advertising revolution using AI and new-age machine learning technology.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning-based technology company Topsort announced it had raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Upload Ventures and returning seed round investors Quiet Capital and Pear Ventures. The Series A round sees the company valued at $150 million.
Topsort will use this round of funding to scale further its clean advertising platform that’s free of creepy third-party cookie tracking and privacy-invasive data – a significant departure from the advertising world of yesterday and a leap towards democratizing the same kind of auction-based advertising that garnered massive profits for giants like Google and Amazon. As the industry closes the chapter on third-party cookies, Topsort’s platform serves as the connective tissue for the post-cookie world of ads that don’t work around the privacy issue but solve it entirely for enterprise-level customers.
Founded in 2021, Topsort is led by CEO and co-founder Regina Ye, a former beauty brand seller turned advertising disruptor, CTO and co-founder Francisco Larrain, a serial entrepreneur who had two exits including one from Groupon and led its engineering in its heyday, and co-founder and Chief Scientist, Michael Ostrovsky, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a world-renowned economist on auction theory, game theory, and marketplace design.
“This funding round further fuels our mission to accelerate the clean advertising revolution using AI and new-age machine learning technology. Only one part of what’s to come is the democratization of auction-based advertising technology into Bidless formats, which previously had a much higher bar of entry and amassed an insane amount of profit for some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley,” said Topsort CEO and co-founder Regina Ye. “With Topsort, we hope to democratize access to KPI-driven, efficient, and transparent media in the new age of post-cookies to enterprise retailers, top brands and agencies, and small, long-tail sellers alike. Advertisers of all shapes and sizes can benefit from a highly profitable ad business that works for everyone within the ecosystem.”
Since its inception just a few years ago, Topsort has earned the trust of major retailers, marketplaces, and brands, including Poshmark, Cencosud, Unilever, Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, General Mills, Glovo (part of Delivery Hero), Phillips and many more. It previously raised $8.6 million in a seed round in 2022.
