The two companies merge to become Lumen, with FirstPartyCapital leading a £3M funding round to drive expansion across the US and Europe

Lumen Research, the leader in attention measurement, has announced that it is to merge with Avocet, the two combining to become Lumen. This formalises a long-standing partnership between the two companies, bringing together Lumen’s industry-leading panel and Avocet’s scaled advertising technology.

The merger positions Lumen as the industry’s leading attention-measurement platform with the technological and panel capability of realising omni-channel measurement in a post-cookie/ID landscape.

The £3M round will turbo-charge Lumen’s expansion in both the US and Europe, supporting further innovation and technological development in its ground-breaking attention measurement solutions.

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Lumen now plans four hires over the next six months in the US – across account management, advertising operations, data strategy and marketing – with a new team operating out of New York to complement Lumen’s existing presence in San Francisco.

Mike Follett, managing director of Lumen Research, says: “We’re immensely excited to be taking such bold steps forward with our astonishing partners at Avocet. This merger will lead to a step change in the way the industry thinks about attention; creating a new category of attention measurement and optimisation. Viewability is already a well-known and understood category, but the market has been calling out for evolution in the measurement of attention. Our growth will answer this need and enable us to go further, faster.”

Ezra Pierce, CEO, Avocet, says: “This exciting development at Avocet follows a long and successful period of working closely with the Lumen Research team to deliver ground-breaking products to the market. Together, we are embedding attention measurement in the industry and we know we can achieve even more great things as a combined team.”

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Rich Ashton, managing partner at FirstPartyCapital, adds: “This is one of the most exciting categories within ad tech right now, and Lumen is at the very forefront of the innovation curve. We have reviewed numerous startups in this space, and have not seen any other solutions that combine industry-leading ad tech expertise with such extensive panel data. Following a very successful JV, the merger brings together two great teams, providing an unparalleled solution for advertisers and media owners. This is a once in a decade opportunity to become a global category winner, and the new gold standard for measurement.

This news follows Lumen’s partnerships with leading media organisations such as Dentsu, Havas, Teads and Seedtag, as it continues to help a range of businesses to measure attention and to link this to outcomes.

Lumen operates the world’s largest and longest-lasting continuous eye tracking panels to measure the consumer attention generated by media impressions. Its attention measurement platform (LAMP) records visual attention from consenting participants; creating a training data set for machine learning models to score an array of formats, with Lumen’s LAMP tag measuring attentiveness on an ongoing basis.