David Beisel
The modern-day digital advertising ecosystem is a complex one, riddled with challenges as it has evolved towards an opaque twisted and snarled programmatic web. A new startup Sincera, armed with its innovative “Metadata Engine,” aims to untangle this complexity. It provides partners in the ecosystem a way to build data-driven solutions across pressing issues like made-for-advertising detection, consent enforcement, attention-based targeting, and detection of malicious ad creative. This promise has led NextView Ventures to lead a $4.2M seed funding round to accelerate the development and adoption of Sincera’s platform. In conjunction with this financing, I’ve joined the company’s Board and wanted to shed a light on why we made this investment.
Deep Domain Expertise at the Helm
Sincera Founders Mike O’Sullivan and Ian Meyers bring to the table a rich expertise and domain knowledge in the ad tech space. Their extensive experience, spanning tenures at LiveRamp, Index Exchange, Roku, Criteo, Microsoft, and AppNexus, provides both technical and strategic depth to the company. But it was the glowing endorsement from industry peers of Mike and Ian as a “can’t miss duo” and “the absolute best ad tech product people” which resounded during our diligence. Their unique blend of vision and expertise isn’t just a fortuitous asset to Sincera, but a cornerstone that we believe will accelerate tackling some of the hardest problems in digital advertising.
Fostering Ecosystem Growth
Moreover, Sincera’s approach of serving the broader ecosystem resonates with us and others. By providing essential tools, Sincera aids businesses in enhancing their products, thereby creating a collaborative environment for advertisers, publishers, and ad technology platforms customers to thrive. Their recent partnership with The Trade Desk to develop a Made-for-Advertising (MFA) detection model is an example of Sincera’s collective ethos.
It’s no surprise, then, that the funding round which the company just announced also included endorsement from notable insider venture groups and angel investors alongside NextView. Aperiam Ventures, LiveRamp Ventures, and The Trade Desk’s TD7 venture group’s participation echoes a shared confidence in Sincera’s potential to carve out new standards in digital advertising. That fact is further corroborated by participating leading angel investors in adtech, including Jonah Goodhart, Ari Paparo, Auren Hoffman, and Dave Yaffe.
With the seed funding, Sincera plans to expand its engineering team to better serve the flood of customer interest which the company has experienced since launching last year. Having already been seed investors in other notable marketing tech companies like TripleLift, Attentive, and TapCommerce, we at NextView are excited about the journey ahead for Sincera in making a positive impact on the space. We’re not just backing a team and a product; we’re backing a vision of a more transparent future for digital advertising.