Visible Measures started as a member of an early cluster of promising digital video technology startups in Boston. The latest twist in their funding script is a bit anticlimactic.
Visible Measures has just raised a down round of $7 million with existing investors, The Wall Street Journal reported, Wednesday. The news was buried below the headline in a post about how the nine-year-old company faces a tough market and plans to turn its focus from R&D to sales.
In a news release Thursday, the company touted its programmatic ad buying technology for native ads. That seems to be its new, narrowed focus. "We are pushing hard to create a liquid market for native advertising," Shin told me in an email today. "Hopefully this will help to improve the overall consumer experience by having advertising be more like content and offer better effectiveness for advertisers."
The new round values Visible Measures at less than $200 million, WSJ's Lizette Chapman reported. $200 million pre-money is the sticker price investors put on Visible Measures back in 2012, when the company raised its last round, a $25 million Series E. The latest commitment from investors General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital, Commonfund and Advance Publications* brings Visible Measures' total capital raised to $72 million.
Ad tech is a tough business and video ad tech isn't immune to its challenges. One of Visible Measures' contemporaries, a venture-backed video ad network called ScanScout, got snapped up by Tremor Video in 2010. Four years later, Tremor Video ($TRMR) is trading at less than one quarter its IPO price of a little over a year ago.
Meanwhile, founder Brian Shin has been working on a side project. Founded in 2012, Mustbin makes a secure system for sharing documents via mobile device. (Mustbin laid out its plans for the year with us, back in January.) It looks like--for now at least--he'll have more of his attention occupied with Visible Measures.
Shin told the Journal Visible Measures' revenue is in the "tens of millions" and the company is cash-flow neutral. A year ago, he told my colleague Kyle Alspach the company was "close to HubSpot" in revenue. At the time, HubSpot was reporting $77.6 million in sales, according to the S-1 it filed ahead of its October IPO--and Visible Measures had about 160 employees. For those of you turning over envelopes, if you guess $100K per employee, that's a payroll burn rate of $16 million a year. Visible has cut staff since then, laying off about 30 in September, Scott Kirsner reported in BetaBoston at the time.
Until now, the company had been working on "innovative," "strategic" products that "don't have an immediate revenue," Shin told the Journal. (This unheralded video discovery feature baked into Samsung TVs might be an example.) “We have to move from the startup phase to the execution phase," he said. That's a tough line to deliver, nine years in--but it sounds like Visible Measures' investors are still hoping for a money shot, somewhere in this film. I hope Shin and co. can keep them in their seats.
*Disclosure: Advance Publications is the parent company of Streetwise Media.
