Featured Startup Pitch: Netherlands-based FlxOne is helping digital advertisers use data to optimize campaigns in real-time

By Matthijs Keij, FlxOne founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: Many real-time advertising analytics companies give insights and there it stops—FlxOne takes it a step further by automatically optimizing performance based on those insights. We focus on the trading specialists (trading desks, agencies, ad networks) and give them the technology to do their work—buying and selling ads—more effectively.

Product/Service Description

The FlxOne DMP (data management platform) finds the right audience. By streamlining the full advertising workflow, we unlock the full potential of your data to eliminate inefficiencies and maximize ROI.

Founders’ Story

Our founding team has a very strong advertising background. We spent, managed, and optimized millions of advertising dollars for global brands like Vodafone, Volkswagen, Kodak, and many more. When real-time bidding (RTB) emerged, we knew this was going to disrupt display advertising and media buying as a whole. After investing all our time into RTB from its early days, we found out we needed additional technology to leverage all the data we generated. Unfortunately, back then the established DMPs didn’t offer the necessary means to unlock the full potential of data, so we took the challenge to build it ourselves and started FlxOne.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

As a startup we’re on a tight marketing budget, so we have to make ‘em count! We only sponsor very specific events in the programmatic industry, and frequently share our thoughts on various blogs.

Market Opportunity

The opportunity is huge! All analysts agree that the RTB, or programmatic, industry will be the fastest-growing ‘channel’ in digital advertising. Depending on the source, the market will grow to $33 billion in 2017.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

I’d say our background enables us to ‘skate where the puck is going.’ By living and breathing advertising, we effectively anticipate on the frequent developments in the market, and more importantly, our clients’ needs. Speaking the same language as ad-ops professionals helps us translate those needs into disruptive product enhancements that make their lives better. For example, advertising platforms and analytics vendors have a reporting delay of four-to-24 hours, but our clients want to know what’s happening right now. Real-time advertising needs real-time data.

Business Model

Our model is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model based on volume. The more advertising impressions we process in our platform, the higher the monthly license fee.

Current Needs

Our goal is to become European market leader in the DMP space. We are currently raising a Series A to fuel international expansion by building our commercial headquarters in the UK. We just signed a well-respected digital media veteran as VP of sales to start building a new team in London.

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Headquarters: Eindhoven, The Netherlands