Sage VC

Backing Campanja to Continue their Global Expansion

For years, advertisers have used Google to drive traffic to their websites and sought to convert that traffic by getting customers to purchase a product or service. Several companies grew along alongside Google (as well as Baidu, Yandex etc) allowing advertisers to access more granular data to understand their value per click.

During the summer of 2010, Google made it possible to do API calls without a transaction fee on Adwords. That move was the genesis of Campanja, a Swedish based adtech startup. They built a system for advertisers to be “real time” from the ground up, enabling profit optimisation based on real time dynamics, second by second, something that was not possible with companies who built their systems on SQL databases. It changed even further last year when Google introduced “Enhanced” campaigns which made it possible to optimise for location, time and by device.

So how do marketers actually benefit from Campanja? The technology allows them to identify the value of an individual visitor and use this information to purchase search engine advertising on Google Adwords, on a high-frequency, real-time basis. Campanja’s product gathers data from other sources and makes an instant ROI analysis to apply changes to the auction process to optimise ad spending. This is technically very demanding and Campanja refers to this as “adding business intelligence to search engine marketing” (SEM). Campanja can demonstrably make smarter bidding decisions, enabling advertisers to increase their performance. In short, Campanja has the most superior SEM bid management product on the market.

This is a really big deal because Campanja is allowing very large companies with monstrous marketing budgets to both save money and increase their revenues. That is why we’re pleased to announce that we are backing the Campanja team alongside Hoxton Ventures, Google seed investor Ram Shriram and David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL in a $5m funding round.

Campanja is another European-to-US success story. Co-founders Marcus Anzengruber and Berner Setterwall, (CEO and CTO) have built up one the strongest technical teams we have ever seen in Europe and their determination to keep investing in hardcore research and development is one of the attributes that makes us believe that their product is going to shift the advertising industry into the next generation. And some of their largest US and European customers agree.

Personally, I am just as excited to be investing alongside Hoxton Ventures, who first invested into Campanja in 2012 and have been instrumental in supporting the company’s ambitious growth strategy (Hoxton is the latest early stage fund to launch in London by Rob Kniaz and Hussein Kanji). This round will help Campanja continue to build out teams in Palo Alto, London and Stockholm and continue to hire some of the best talent in the industry.