Video game ad platform hails six-figure seed funding round

● Edinburgh firm to grow team and improve platform ● Tech business claims to ‘reach unreachables’

Edinburgh-based Adinmo, theprogrammaticadplatform for video games, has secured a six-figure investment round – which will be used to invest in scaling up its capabilities and expanding its team.

The $500,000 (£408,000) round has been led by Techstart Ventures, a top investor in start-ups across Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose previous investments include Dundee-based games services and liveops company Chilliconnect, which was acquired by Unity Technologies in 2019.

Adinmo describes itself as bringing together the power of advertisingwiththereachand audience of video gaming. Its platform enables game-developers to “seamlessly” integrate non-intrusive display ads directly into gameplay.

Adinmo says its ad placements are “sympathetic” to their game environments, appearing for example as billboards in racing games, backgrounds to puzzle games, or coins and power-ups in platform games. “Using programmatic technology, advertisers can target audiences across numerous game genres via Internet Advertising Bureau approved formats, while tracking viewability and brand interaction metrics in real-time,” it adds.

The funding will, as well as enabling the company to accelerate the platform’s capabilities, be used to build out its core team. The first of these key appointments is Chris Wright, who joins as chief technology officer. Wright was previously co-founder and chief technology officer at Edinburgh-based games analytics and ad-tech company Deltadna, which last year was acquired by Unity Technologies.

Adinmo chief executive Kristan Rivers said: “The in-game ad model is currently broken for all stakeholders. Advertisers can only run direct response campaigns, developers only get paid if a player clicks an ad and leaves their game, and players have to put up with constant disruptions.

“Adinmo’s dynamic in-game ad platform solves all of this, by seamlessly integrating nonintrusive ads into gameplay which are impossible to skip, block or ignore, and as a result, Adinmo ad units deliver [four times] higher brand recall compared with video ads. Put simply: Adinmo delivers advertising that reaches the unreachables.”

Techstart Ventures partner Mark Hogarth said: “Kristan and his team at Adinmo have developed an in-game advertising platform that enables brands to access an incredibly broad demographic at scale.”

He added that it lets developers monetise games without affecting the players’ experience. This is why Techstart was delighted to lead this seed round and we look forward to supporting Adinmo as it brings this exciting solution to the world’s most innovative advertisers, publishers and developers.”