Keyword advertising platform ReverseAds raises US$600K from Choco Up to help support the company’s expansion, product development, and talent acquisition

Choco Up, one of Asia’s leading revenue-based financing and growth platform, announced its US$600K funding partnership with leading keyword advertising technology start-up, ReverseAds. Through Choco Up’s funding, ReverseAds will be accelerating its business growth in APAC, Europe and the United States – including opening the firm’s first office in Australia, ramping up research in product development, and expanding the team to support its accelerating growth.

The funding will also lead to the incorporation of blockchain technology as part of ReverseAds App’s ecosystem. As a privacy-first keyword advertising platform, ReverseAds uses blockchain to validate that every click is from authentic, potential buyers of clients’ products or services, without Personal Identifiable Information (PII) collection or storage. Integrating blockchain to the ReverseAds ecosystem helps clients ensure compliance with major data privacy regulations as it allows them to run targeted and precise ad campaigns while collecting and storing zero PII of Internet users in the process.

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In the wake of third-party cookies being phased out due to the growing consumer demand for privacy, the over USD 350 bn digital advertising industry is on the lookout for a way that will enable them to still serve relevant ads at scale. ReverseAds is able to meet this gap as it is the first true alternative to traditional search ads, competing directly with Google on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

Using Big Data, A.I. and predictive modelling, its cookie-less solution helps brands serve intuitive ads based on campaign-level engagement tied to a keyword’s intent. The company does not collect or store any PII on consumers and complies with all evolving data protection regulations, including GDPR, PDPA, CASL, and CCPA. Headquartered in Singapore, ReverseAds employs staff from 27 countries, with offices in Phuket, Bangkok, Canada, and the United States. Over the past year, its monthly revenue has grown by 500% and its year-over-year growth has exceeded 260% from 2020 to 2021.  The platform is an evolution of keyword advertising that helps identify a buyer’s journey post-search. It empowers clients with a diversified roadmap of opportunities at a “below the surface” level of search compared to Google Ads, which are linear in nature and have only one opportunity to generate a click and ultimately a conversion.

With ReverseAds’ assignment algorithm, companies can identify users’ keywords based on past searches, clicks, likes, follows, and purchases, all within GDPR, CASL, and CCPA guidelines. Data such as this is referred to as ‘unstructured data, which comprises 80% of all data. However, this data is currently not being utilized by search ads, leaving a vast quantity of untapped data. The ReverseAds platform leverages this unstructured data and makes each data point valuable by surfacing it. ‘Unstructured data’ refers to any digital identifier that creates a similarity in action or behaviour; for example, a wifi router, a device, or an Internet Protocol (IP) address. This data is completely anonymised, containing no PII of the Internet users.

After the unstructured data is onboarded, it identifies when a user on the considered purchase path has landed on a site within their networks and serves them an ad. ReverseAds then analyses anonymised search data to predict where consumers will go next, thereby improving search campaigns with highly targeted ads delivered in real-time, with better conversion chances.

In one instance, ReverseAds was able to increase user traffic by 1,900% and clicks by 237% for a BMW location in Canada. The partnership resulted in a 22% increase in test drives within 90 days and 120 more sales of new cars compared with other Canadian BMW dealerships.

ReverseAds has won multiple industry awards in 2021: the Tech In Asia Startup Pitch, the Spark Ignite Thailand Startup Competition, the Spark Ignite Global Startup Competition, the TusPark WHA JumpStart China, and the Frontier Digital Technology sector award from SLINGSHOT 2021.

“The mission and vision of Choco Up are to help startups scale and grow by providing a better and more flexible funding solution. Our investment allowed ReverseAds to acquire extra capital for growth without losing any equity. As a result, they can continue to grow the company and boost their metrics, while we invest in a startup with immense growth potential,” said Percy Hung, Co-Founder, and CEO of Choco Up.

“We are grateful for Choco Up’s support, which will go a long way to bolster our expansion in APAC, enabling us to open an office in Australia and bring our unique offerings to a new market. This will enable us to fast-track product development and expand our R&D team in order to better serve our growing stable of clients”, said Michael Hahn, CEO, and Founder of ReverseAds.

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