Montreal video ad platform SourceKnowledge takes $1.5 million mezzanine financing

Montreal’s SourceKnowledge, a performance video advertising company, took in a $1.5 million financing round, essentially a mezzanine loan typically used as an alternative to venture capital, led by BDC Capital, a subsidiary of the Business Development Bank of Canada, money which will be used to scale the company’s Engage advertising platform, and to build out its Vancouver office for expanding North American marketing efforts.
Founded in 2009, SourceKnowledge has been largely bootstrapped, driving growth through profitability, and now delivers over 250 million global video streams daily.
The Engage platform allows advertising campaigns access to more than 60 billion ad opportunities each month through integration with supply-side partners like Facebook, Google, Twitter, LiveRail, AOL, DailyMotion and SpotXchange.
Engage’s success has led SourceKnowledge to a 133% year-over-year revenue increase.
“Focused on transforming how data-driven businesses advertise online, our team is generating revenue at an exponential rate, up 133 percent between 2014 and 2015, and we see an even greater opportunity ahead of us as our programmatic video and display products allow advertisers to engage audiences on any device,” said SourceKnowledge president and co-founder Patrick Hopf. “With this funding in place, we’ll soon be making big investments in expanding our team of talented developers and we’ll scale our outreach strategy so we can make an even greater impact on how advertisers engage with their customers.”
The company’s ethos has been to measure success “based on post-click behaviour”, since it’s easy enough to attract eyeballs to a website, but much more difficult to meaningfully engage those eyeballs after the fact.
Founded as a video demand-side platform (DSP) with a focus on mobile gaming and app publishers, eCommerce brands, SaaS companies and performance driven agencies, SourceKnowledge enables clients to create data-driven omnichannel journeys, allowing for more efficient user acquisition, accompanied by conversion metric-focused transparent reporting.
The company’s other platform, called Reach DSP, saw a 900% growth and revenue between Q1 and Q4 2015.
“SourceKnowledge has developed a strong solution for the online video advertising market. With revenues increasing quickly, SourceKnowledge was a prime candidate for mezzanine financing,” said Benoit Mignacco, Managing Director, Growth and Transition Capital at BDC Capital. “It is particularly well adapted to fast growing, asset-light companies like SourceKnowledge that need patient capital to fuel their growth.”
In Q1 2015, SourceKnowledge announced a 938% increase in mobile ad inventory over the same period in 2014.
In the second half of 2015, SourceKnowledge doubled the size of its development team, and opened a Vancouver office for serving the North American West coast.
Advertisers can use the platform to leverage video and display assets, data targeting and re-engagement capabilities across multiple devices.