Regina Ye says she and Topsort Co-founder Francisco Larrain has learned a lot in the two years since launching their auction advertising startup.
The company raised $8 million in seed funding in 2022 to value the company at $110 million. Topsort develops retail multimedia technology for small businesses to use auctions as a way to create effective advertising.
Fed up with how complicated it was to create ad campaigns on Meta, Amazon and Google created a simple API for users to install. When starting a campaign, clients can add elements such as sponsor listings, banner ads, and video ads. They then control how the ads are displayed, how the quality and relevance of the ads are measured, and who can start campaigns.
The founders also recognized that its plug-and-play product resonated with e-commerce markets of different sizes. Today, Topsort is used by markets in 35 countries from companies such as Poshmark and Youtravel.me.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be able to get really good advertising results,” Ye told TechCrunch. “We’ve tried a lot of things since then and found what works, and last year was incredible growth for us. We’ve grown nearly 10x in terms of revenue and have a similar scale of ambition for this year.”
Topsort also changed its focus to be more business-friendly and created more advanced features. It now counts P&G, General Mills and Danone among its clients.
All that growth excited investors who pumped another $20 million in Series A capital into Topsort along with a valuation boost to $150 million post-money. Upload Ventures led the round with backing from existing investors including Quiet Capital and Pear Ventures. The company has now raised $28.6 million in total.
The company is now focusing on what happens now that cookies are gone. Topsort wants to fix advertising’s reputation for being “slimy” about user privacy. It created a cleanroom function to combine user data without actually “being creepy,” Ye said.
“Everyone is wondering what will happen to advertising after cookies, and we believe we have the answer in the pure advertising solution,” said Ye. “We’ve spent three years building a very solid offering and today, we have probably the most comprehensive offering on the market.”
