Catching the attention of customers can hinge on timing and placement. That’s the thinking behind New York’s LiveIntent, which offers advertisers and publishers a way to tailor banner ads in e-mails for the recipients. The two-year-old startup closed an $8 million Series B funding round in September and, according to chief operating officer David Hendricks, is moving fast to grow its ranks. “If we aren’t double our size in one year, I’d be surprised,” he says.
LiveIntent’s latest funding, led by Shasta Ventures, brings the company’s total backing to $13 million. Other investors in LiveIntent include First Round Capital, Battery Ventures, Grape Arbor VC, and Lerer Ventures. Hendricks says the company will use its most recent funding to add more sales, technical, and operations personnel to the current staff of 25.
LiveIntent’s technology picks which banner ads to display when people open their e-mail messages, based on demographics and other information. So a person who receives an e-mail on a smartphone in New York City will see a different banner ad than a person who reads the same e-mail on a tablet device in Dubuque, Iowa. “We make the decision of which ad to send based on where somebody is when they open the message,” Hendricks says.
The idea of tailoring mass e-mails is gaining more attention from
