In August, I wrote about Adam Soroca's departure from struggling Millennial Media ($MM). Soroca, a Jumptap veteran, was leaving to start a new, stealthy adtech startup. On Tuesday morning, he's announcing it. Called nToggle, the company aims at providing a better delivery system for the increasingly large amount of data flowing through ad exchanges.
NToggle is one of a handful of stealthy startups we've been keeping an eye on at BostInno. Based in Boston, the company has raised a $5.6 million Series A from two VC firms and a handful of angel investors. They're betting that, just as nearly the entire Internet moved to rich media in the aughts, advertising will move almost entirely to programmatic ad placement. NToggle would be the Akamai to that process, speeding it past intolerance for slow performance.
Angel investors hail from adtech companies and venture firms in four cities, including: from Boston, Mike Baker of DataXu and Ric Cavilo of Nanigans; John Hadl of U.S. Venture Partners in L.A.; Eric Roza and Chris Scoggins of Denver-based DataLogix; Howie Schwartz of New York-based Human Demand; and Sourabh Niyogi of MdotM, based in San Mateo, Calif.
The institutions are Boston-based Sigma Prime, represented by John Simon, and Bessemer Venture Partners, represented by Kent Bennett, who is based in Boston. George Bell, a longtime executive-in-residence (XIR) at General Catalyst, is an independent board member, alongside Hadl. GC invested in Jumptap (and placed Bell as its turnaround CEO in 2010), but isn't in this deal.
Soroca, nToggle's chief executive, told me nToggle now has 11 people and is deploying in a month* or so with one sell-side beta customer and a "handful" of buy-siders. "We're entering the market in a partner-friendly way, much similar to Akamai," he said.
He wouldn't say much about the company's technology, but described the opportunity as the torrid growth in the volume of bid requests crossing ad exchanges in the daily auctions between ad exchanges on the sell side and demand-side platforms on the buy side. (Several ad exchanges now report bid-request volume in the multiple trillions per month.) Patience with the heavy bandwidth demands and poor performance is dwindling, Soroca said, especially inside the biggest spenders, some of which have brought their programmatic adtech in-house.
"Any big new tech trend like search or web or browsers, inefficiencies are accepted during the onset of the technology," said Soroca, a Lycos vet before he joined Jumptap. "Internet browsing it was OK with the first browsers, but it got really a lot better with Mozilla Firefox. The Internet was a slow place, up until Akamai."
*Editor's note: An earlier version said a week to the beta deploy. Should've said a month. Apologies to any early-rising nToggle engineers.
