The 19 most interesting ad-tech and mar-tech companies of 2018

CEO: Ari Paparo

Employees: 60

2018 revenue: $25 million

Total funding to date: $13.3 million

Comment: Most ad-tech companies work by charging advertisers a fee based on the amount of ad spend. Beeswax’s model is different and promises to save customers like Foursquare money by charging them a flat fee based on how much tech and software they need (starting at $10,000 a month), then stores their tech stack in the cloud. The startup says that business has increased 150% year-over-year, primarily from marketers taking programmatic buying in-house.

CEO: Bill Magnuson

Employees: 270

2018 revenue: $53 million

Total funding to date: $175 million

Comment: Brands are increasingly pumping money into technology that crunches reams of web, email, and mobile data and can fire off millions of personalized push notifications and emails. Braze (formerly Appboy) is somewhat of an alternative to marketing clouds like Salesforce and Adobe but without the high costs and cookie-cutter deals that marketing clouds are known for. And as more marketers focus on collecting first-party data in light of regulation like Europe's GDPR, the hype is at least winning over investors: Braze raised $80 million in Series E funding in October. The company is now valued at $850 million.

CEO: Ran Sarig

Employees: 400

2018 revenue: Salesforce Marketing Cloud will make $13.24 billion, according to guidance from its third-quarter earnings

Comment: With advertisers desperate to know if their ads are working, Datorama corrals all of a brand's data into a dashboard and uses artificial intelligence to evaluate media spending effectiveness so that advertisers can shift their investments accordingly. The firm's inroads with big brands like Ticketmaster and Pepsi grabbed Salesforce's attention; it acquired Datorama for a reported $800 million.

CEO: Gil Elbaz

Employees: 200

2018 revenue: Between $40 million and $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter

Total funding to date: $104 million

Comment: Location-based advertising firms have taken a hit under GDPR because of privacy and legal concerns as well as challenges in targeting ads to smartphones, which is why Factual steers clear of paid media. Instead, the firm helps marketers analyze and measure location stats and powers the mapping technology within apps including Uber, Snapchat, and Apple Maps. In September, Factual clinched $42 million in funding with plans to grow a team in the Asia-Pacific region.

CEO: Zvika Netter

Employees: More than 220

Revenue: $60 million in 2017

Total funding to date: $65 million

Comment: Innovid is one of a handful of ad-tech companies that got their start in delivering digital video ads and transitioned to dropping ads into connected TVs. The company wouldn't share 2018 revenue but said that its connected-TV business has doubled this year and now makes up 30% of its total revenue. "They've established their presence with digital, but they'll add scale by adding TV," Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said.

CEO: Scott Knoll

Employees: More than 600

2018 revenue: $180 million (trailing 12 months as of June 2017)

Comment: Marketers are hungry for third parties to make sure their ads are running next to brand-safe content, and IAS remains one of a few established companies at the forefront of this space. Its edge led private-equity firm Vista Equity to purchase a majority stake in the company in June, rumored to be valued at $850 million. Next up: tackling OTT and TV measurement.

CEO: Sean Muller

Employees: 165

2018 revenue: $40 million, according to people familiar with the matter

Total funding to date: $57.8 million

Comment: TV ad measurement is a messy problem that a handful of startups are vying to solve. iSpot TV arms marketers with granular viewing data from TV ads by pulling stats straight from smart TV devices. The company has a long-term deal with TV manufacturer Vizio to license data and works with network clients including NBCUniversal to track whether TV ads drive action for brands. In September, iSpot TV secured $30 million in Series C funding.

CEO: Scott Howe

Employees: 750

2018 revenue: Between $275 million and $285 million

Comment: After spinning off Acxiom to Interpublic Group for $2.3 billion in July, LiveRamp became a stand-alone public company solely focused on helping advertisers use offline data like loyalty cards and CRM data to inform digital ads — data that Forrester Research's Joe Stanhope called "arguably one of the most comprehensive identity offerings on the planet. That's compelling — there's a lot of companies that might be interested in that."

CEO: Sam Kim

Employees: 27

2018 revenue: $1 million to $2 million

Total funding to date: $5 million

Comment: Some think blockchain is more hype than substance, but its potential to shake up how advertising is bought and tracked is still a burgeoning area for advertisers and publishers. After securing an initial $5 million in funding in August, Lucidity is working with brands like Toyota to sniff out fraud and "ad-tech taxes" that layer hidden fees into buying digital ads. The company is also helping the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab's pilot program to create best practices for the industry.

CEO: Steve Lucas

Employees: 1,300

2018 revenue: At least $38.4 million, according to Marketo's credit-rating process

Comment: The race to own marketing software that can crunch huge reams of data and target consumers with specific messaging continues to grow, especially for marketing cloud companies. Adobe snapped up Marketo for an eye-popping $4.75 billion in September in its largest acquisition to date, which will help it compete with Salesforce and Oracle with "as comprehensive suite of offerings as possible," Pivotal's Wieser said. This year's expected $38.4 million in revenue represents a 20% year-over-year increase.

CEO: Michael Katz

Employees: 110

Revenue: $20 million

Total funding to date: $76 million

Comment: Think of mParticle as an alternative to the marketing clouds like Adobe and Salesforce — at least when it comes to storing and moving around reams of data for clients such as Airbnb and Spotify. The firm pulls data from websites and apps and then sends it to other tech companies that handle push notifications, email, and advertising.

CEO: Joe Zawadzki

Employees: 750

2018 revenue: More than $265 million

Total funding to date: Over $500 million

Comment: For years rumors have swirled about a takeover of MediaMath, which kicked back up this summer after AT&T acquired AppNexus. But instead MediaMath received $225 million in funding from private-equity firm Searchlight Capital Partners, signaling that one of the industry's most prominent and oldest names still has plenty of room to grow. In addition to running one of the largest demand-side platforms that helps advertisers buy display ads across swaths of websites, the company also manages customer data from their digital ads and is investing in artificial intelligence to facilitate ad buying and tracking. MediaMath is "still a strong player" that's "always in the mix, especially if you’re looking at multiple DSPs," Matt Mobley, the chief technology officer at Merkle, said.

CEO: Anthony Wood

Employees: 1,000

2018 revenue: $727 million

Comment: Roku is switching from being a hardware company to an advertising juggernaut and wants to power the pipes of publishers' OTT apps as well as its own app. The company's growing user base of connected TV owners could help fend off Amazon's ambitions in tracking OTT ads. During its recent third-quarter earnings, Roku reported that it has 23.8 million active customer accounts, a 43% year-over-year spike.

CEO: Tobi Lütke

Employees: More than 3,000

Revenue: $1.1 billion

Comment: With 600,000 merchants using its e-commerce platform and marketing tools, Shopify hardly counts as an upstart, which makes its rapid growth remarkable. As more marketers — including a slew of direct-to-consumer customers like Outdoor Voices and Allbirds — handle ecommerce in-house, Shopify is quietly becoming their one-stop shop for everything from fulfillment to analytics and advertising. Earlier this year, the company revamped to let merchants run digital-ad campaigns across Facebook and Google.

CEO: Ben Barokas

Employees: 25

Revenue: Less than $30 million

Total funding to date: $26 million

Comment: Sourcepoint started out fighting the rise in ad blockers with technology for publishers that offered people other ways to pay for content, like subscriptions or micro-payments. When the digital-ad industry buzz turned to GDPR, Sourcepoint pivoted, rolling out a consent-management platform that helps publishers tackle how they collect explicit permission from web customers to serve ads while avoiding fees from regulation.

CEO: Jeff Green

Employees: 1,000

2018 revenue: At least $464 million, according to its third-quarter guidance

Comment: The Trade Desk is a standout in the notoriously shaky market for public ad-tech companies. Since going public two years ago, the company has continuously performed well, growing revenue 50% year-over-year in the third quarter and impressed media buyers with its account help, self-service platform, and transparency into digital advertising's often murky inventory and pricing. "They've cornered the market on a global basis in a way that just makes them more desirable to use than other DSPs for a number of situations," Jay Friedman, the president of Goodway Group, said.

CEO: Victor Wong

Employees: 60

2018 revenue: $15 million

Total funding to date: $60 million

Comment: As marketers pump more money into programmatic advertising, a crop of startups are pitching software that can test and optimize creative on the fly. Thunder has a platform that brands use to track and manage creative and also runs an ad server that competes with Google Marketing Platform, offering brands a solid ad-tech alternative to Google.

CEO: Brian Lesser

Employees: 1,500

Revenue: $7 billion

Comment: AT&T has big ambitions to be an advertising juggernaut and acquired one of the largest ad-tech firms this year to prove so. AT&T acquired AppNexus for a reported $1.6 billion in June, fueling rumors over which high-flying ad-tech firm could be snatched up next. AppNexus is now folded into AT&T's recently created Xandr unit, which, under former WPP executive Brian Lesser, aims to shake up TV and digital advertising using data and premium content from sibling company WarnerMedia. "They're making a big, bold bet," said Eric Franchi, the founder of Undertone who now invests in digital media and marketing companies at MathCapital.