Simplifying Performance Marketing – Foundry Invests in Integrate

Performance marketing has been both a very lucrative side of internet advertising but also a bit of the wild west, where rules are made to be stretched or broken (with alarming regularity). And while the simplicity of pay for performance has been attractive to many advertisers, diligence has been required to monitor the quality of the traffic and leads generated by performance marketers. In particular, control of creative assets and their appropriate use has been a concern for many advertisers. In addition, existing performance marketing platforms have been limited solely to online assets.

Enter Integrate – a platform that simplifies the execution of performance marketing campaigns and allows advertisers unprecedented control over their campaigns. Integrate places transparency into the marketplace for both publishers and buyers, allowing both to review one another’s business data before making an informed decision to work together. In addition, algorithms are built into Integrate to monitor deceitful practices that have previously plagued the industry. The Integrate platform provides legitimacy and basic regulation to an industry that has seriously lacked it. As a result, since its inception earlier this year, Integrate has attracted some of the largest internet performance advertisers as well as a number of well known retailers and brands who had not previously been significant buyers of performance based leads.

Today we’re announcing a $4.25M financing for the company that we believe will push its growth trajectory even higher. It joins a handful of adtech related investments in the Foundry portfolio (coming soon: my Foundry Unified Theory of AdTech Investing) that together are enabling online advertisers to better target specific users (AdMeld and Triggit), more effectively place media (Integrate and Trada) and access new publishers (Lijit) and media (Medialets).

Integrate was founded by Hart Cunningham and Jeremy Bloom, with whom I’ve had the fortune to work with over the last 5 months as this investment came together. These guys eat, breathe and sleep (literally – I think they have a cot in the office) performance marketing. I have a deep appreciation for passionate entrepreneurs and Jeremy and Hart fit this mold to a tee.

We’re looking forward to telling you more about Integrate as we continue to build and enhance the platform and add more and more advertisers and publishers to the Integrate platform.

Some additional coverage of the financing:
TechCrunch,
Mashable