a revenue-generating platform, and Sivaramakrishnan says she is pleased with where things stand. The company plans to make its commercial product publicly available before the end of the year.
Going forward, Drawbridge will rely on a traditional online advertising business model, charging by the three standard metrics of cost per impression, cost per click, and cost per action.
In May, the company announced that it had collected a Series A financing round totaling $6.5 million from VC power houses Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
Two years after its founding, the San Mateo-based company has grown to about 20 employees.
While there are certainly other companies promising big innovation in the mobile ads space—including Google— Sivaramakrishnan doesn’t think Drawbridge has much serious competition.
“This idea is so compelling, so ambitious and such a big idea that there are absolutely going to be competitors attacking this problem in ways similar to us from business perspective,” she says. “But the kind of technology we build, the quality of the science, hopefully gives us that edge in terms of superior performance.”
Part of that confidence comes from Sivaramakrishnan’s conversations with her technology’s early adopters. Instead of having to convince advertisers that Drawbridge can offer revolutionary ad-targeting technology, the customers she has approached are mostly interested in how the company has been able to make it work. “The conversation is, ‘How you can really do this?’ There are many advertisers willing to be that early candidate who is willing to test this platform out.”
