CTV ad tech business Vibe.co has raised $50 million in Series B funding, the company announced this morning, in a round led by Hedosophia and joined by previous backers including Elaia and Singular. The funding comes a year and a half after Vibe’s $22.5 million Series A round, and brings Vibe’s total valuation to $410 million.
Vibe, founded in 2022, specialises in hyper-targeted CTV advertising, offering creative, targeting, measurement, and attribution capabilities which make CTV more accessible to small and medium-sized advertisers. Arthur Querou, CEO and co-founder, describes the company as “Meta for TV advertising”, and says that Vibe is successfully attracting Instagram advertisers to TV, “unlocking an entirely new channel for performance marketers”.
The company has grown quickly since its launch, reaching a $100 million revenue run rate in less than two years, which Querou says makes it one of the ten fastest software companies to reach that milestone. And the CEO sees plenty of room for further growth. “The performance TV advertising market is on track to surpass social media advertising by 2035, driven by an influx of DTC brands and Instagram advertisers,” he said. “It’s a trillion-dollar market and we are leading the industry forward.”
Vibe says the new funding will be used to enhance its generative and agentic AI capabilities for media buying and creative production, to expand its yield management tools for publishers, and to deepen its integrations with streaming partners and measurement platforms across the US.
Small businesses, big potential
For years we’ve seen brands hitting the limits of the incremental reach they can find on social media, and dipping their toes into TV advertising. But TV advertising has historically been a very different beast. Even as some of the most obvious barriers to SMEs — such as high minimum spends — have been lowered, there have still been significant blockers. The simplicity and speed of setting up a campaign, flexibility and ability to optimise campaigns at speed, and in-built measurement and attribution tools of the social platforms have often been missing in the TV world.
Vibe is one of a number of companies seeking to plug these gaps. Its own proprietary technology, which it says is powered by millions of consumer profiles and monthly purchase signals, is used to target ads based on purchase intent and behavioural data, while integrations with measurement partners also help prove ROI. The idea is to directly demonstrate returns to advertisers in the same way Meta and Google Ads do.
Just under a year ago, the company debuted an AI-powered video editor called Vibe Studio, capable of generating ad creative. Creative has traditionally been another factor preventing smaller companies from investing in TV, but AI tools are helping bring down costs. Today, more than ten percent of the ad creative which runs through Vibe is AI-generated, and the company expects this to grow to 30 percent by the end of 2026.
The numbers suggest that Vibe’s pitch is resonating with advertisers. In February last year, the company claimed around 2000 clients in the US — now this number has grown to over 5000. Vibe also expects to reach profitability at the end of the year.
Broadcasters themselves are increasingly moving to capture the SME opportunity, as shown, for example, by the planned UK launch of a new self-serve platform from ITV, Channel 4, and Sky. Several US broadcasters and streamers have also launched self-serve tools. But this doesn’t necessarily conflict with Vibe’s ambitions. The SME market is, by definition, large and fractured, and Vibe has had success in building a big client base across thousands of smaller businesses. Broadcasters and streamers are typically hungry for incremental demand, so when a company like Vibe is able to bring in new incremental spend, they’re generally eager to work with them even if they already have their own SME-oriented offering.
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