Proper Media Acquires Spoutable, Last Piece of Venture Studio

Cursive Labs founders

After learning that Proper Media, a San Diego specialist in programmatic digital advertising had acquired Spoutable, it took a couple weeks to catch up with Spoutable CEO Jon Belmonte and ask: What happened to Cursive Labs?

Spoutable began more than three years ago as part of Cursive Labs, a kind of holding company for startups that was founded with $2.2 million on a “venture studio” model that allows experienced entrepreneurs to run with their own ideas. As Belmonte explained in 2015, “In a venture studio, you’re building your own companies. You have 100 percent equity ownership, you’re in control, and you’re betting on yourself instead of somebody else.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

According to Belmonte, Cursive Labs’ six co-founders started three tech companies. But Spoutable eventually became the sole focus of all their time and energy. The team folded Bumblecast, a marketing platform for event organizers, after six months or so. A third technology development effort for using machine learning to optimize ads to meet customer goals was combined with Spoutable.

“I think what we realized six, nine, 12 months in was that while we had a lot of capital, the reality was that we didn’t raise enough to do multiple companies,” Belmonte said.

As Spoutable advanced its technology, which mixes various forms of promoted and native media and uses machine learning to select the design that best serves a customer’s goals, Belmonte said they found their business was “highly complementary” with Proper Media’s. Eight Spoutable employees have joined Proper Media, including CEO Jon Belmonte and CTO Josh Schlesser.

Ryan Bettencourt, who was a co-director with Belmonte at Cursive Labs, moved onto another opportunity, Belmonte said.

In announcing the acquisition, Proper Media said Spoutable’s 2 billion monthly ad impressions “doubles Proper Media’s reach with its highly viewable and engaging advertising placements.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, although the companies said that Spoutable generated $39 million of revenue on a pro forma basis, and was profitable in 2017.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.