A local startup focused on helping consumers and businesses understand media biases recently raised a Series A round to further its mission of rating all news to positively transform society.
Westminster-based Ad Fontes Media creates a media bias chart to educate readers, teachers and students about the U.S. media landscape. It also sells data to stakeholders in the media ecosystem, such as publishers, social media companies and advertising firms. Ad Fontes founder and CEO Vanessa Otero said selling data is the startup’s primary business.
“What I thought the main use for our data was going to be was helping advertisers avoid misinformation or extremely polarizing content,” Otero said.
When she started talking to more brands and stakeholders, she found many of them avoided advertising with news outlets, something Otero said was the worst possibility.
“We had this worst of all possible worlds where these little websites that are sort of cheap to make have enough money,” Otero said. “... But then the real journalism outlets, like the ones that actually cost money to have staff and editorial standards and all that, they're being starved for funding from these big advertisers who are just a little scared to step into news at all anymore.”
Otero began working on Ad Fontes around the 2016 presidential election because the level of polarization and misinformation bothered her. This led her to create a media biases chart.
At the time, Otero was the only person making and updating this chart. To reduce the biases within her own chart, she came up with a methodology and taxonomy to determine what makes news sources trustworthy, good, fake or bad.
“There are things you can actually measure from the content,” Otero said.
Otero started hand-coding articles, sentence by sentence, to determine what made the content people identify as reliable or biased. In 2019, Otero began training analysts with different political views on this methodology. She found that people were rating media outlets similar to each other regardless of their own biases.
Today, Ad Fontes has 65 part-time analysts and a full-time team of 14 people.
The company decided to raise a $4.2 million Series A round earlier this month to prepare for the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
"We’re at a point where so many Americans say that the other party is out to destroy our country,” Otero said. “... Not just polarization but specifically affective polarization — the kind of polarization that makes you dislike and hate and distrust the other side — it's so high and it's a really dangerous time for our country.”
The recent Series A round was led by Aion Ventures with participation from New Community Transformation Fund-Denver and Will Luttrell, an advertising tech entrepreneur.
“We are at a pivotal point in our history where we have reached extreme levels of polarization,” Troy Root, a managing partner of Aion Ventures, said in a statement. “... At the root of the problem is the advertising ecosystem which has been stripping quality information providers, while funding misinformation. ... Ad Fontes has created a superior methodology and dataset to be implemented into the adtech ecosystem to help reverse this cycle.”
The fresh funds will go toward a new training model that will use artificial intelligence and humans to score content. Ad Fontes also plans to expand internationally to Brazil and India. The company currently focuses on the U.S. and has some coverage in Europe.
Ad Fontes, which was named a Colorado Startup to Watch in 2022, doubled its client base within the last year and launched a Spanish language expansion in April.
Prior to this Series A round, Ad Fontes raised two crowdfunding rounds between 2020 and 2022, bringing in $1.8 million.
“Being able to provide real-time scoring of reliability and bias for new sources accurately [and] at scale, has always been like the North Star for us, and we're closer to achieving that than ever,” Otero said.
