
MOLOCO, a leader in machine learning and growth solutions for mobile app marketers and eCommerce companies, has taken another step towards bringing sophisticated, transparent machine learning (ML) models to businesses worldwide. This developed after it recently raised $150 million in Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management, an investment firm focused on public and private companies in the global internet, software, consumer and financial technology industries. MOLOCO has now raised $200 million to date, giving it a total valuation of $1.5 billion.
“Until now, only the world’s largest technology companies have benefited from the power of exceptional machine learning”, said Ikkjin Ahn, co-founder and CEO of MOLOCO. “Our goal is to make machine learning models accessible to more businesses so that they can leverage their first-party customer data for better user acquisition, customer engagement, monetisation and growth. As consumer privacy restrictions evolve and become more stringent, it is increasingly critical for businesses to activate their own customer data in order to inform and optimise business decisions”.
MOLOCO was founded in 2013 by Ikkjin Ahn, an early ML engineer at YouTube, part of Google. Ahn was a pioneer of ML at YouTube and Android, where he built significant parts of the company’s data and ML infrastructure. He founded MOLOCO with the vision of making sophisticated machine learning algorithms available as a cloud service to a wide variety of businesses, industries and use cases.
MOLOCO Cloud is a Demand Side Platform (DSP) that enables advertisers to programmatically purchase ad inventory across the mobile app ecosystem. The DSP is purpose-built for performance advertisers and leverages the company’s ML engine, first-party data and contextual signals to optimise ad spend. MOLOCO Cloud uniquely provides marketers with the performance benefits of ML combined with full transparency, in contrast to the walled gardens that dominate ad budgets.
MOLOCO Cloud has been rapidly adopted by mobile gaming companies that deploy quantitative marketing strategies as their primary channel of growth. As the strategies developed by mobile gaming companies have become more popular with disruptors across industries, MOLOCO has quickly grown its revenue from e-commerce, social media, personal finance and direct-to-consumer commerce companies. “Most machine learning models can deliver accurate predictions for only one industry taxonomy”, said Ahn. “Our deep learning neural network models and data infrastructure were designed from day one to be flexible enough to ingest any type of commercial data and make exceptionally accurate predictions. Our growth and performance in diversified industries demonstrate the depth and flexibility of our machine learning platform”.
MOLOCO’s next major release, the Retail Media Platform, is currently in beta with select customers. The Retail Media platform enables eCommerce companies to leverage their customers’ first-party data to create new revenue streams, including sponsored ads powered by MOLOCO’s product recommendation engine.
MOLOCO spent six years developing its ML and data infrastructure and making it available as an ultra-low latency cloud service. The company’s deep learning neural network model is hosted in the cloud and makes more than 2 million deep learning prediction queries per second and generates highly accurate predictions in under 100 milliseconds.
MOLOCO currently serves more than 13 billion ad impressions monthly and reaches nearly 10 billion global devices through 5.58 million apps, including those from developers such as King Digital, Playrix, Netmarble and others. MOLOCO employs more than 200 people in 8 offices throughout the world, with more than 60% of its team in engineering and data science—an unusually high percentage compared to similar companies.
“The mobile advertising ecosystem runs increasingly on data, and no one provides better data-driven solutions than MOLOCO”, said Maxim Kirilenko, chief business development officer at Playrix, the mobile developer behind free-to-play titles such as Fishdom and Gardenscapes, and the third-largest mobile game developer in the world in terms of revenue. “Whether for programmatic user acquisition or for in-house control of their data, MOLOCO’s machine learning-powered solutions give us the edge we need to thrive in today’s data-driven mobile landscape”.
The financing will enable MOLOCO to accelerate its product and engineering roadmap, while supporting strategic expansion into new geographies and high-growth markets. It will also hire for key positions within the organisation.
“The volume of digital data produced is growing exponentially yet the tools available for taking action on that data remain relatively limited. We invested in MOLOCO because its machine learning algorithms have proven to be among the best available and the level of transparency and sophistication the company brings to data-driven businesses is paramount in today’s world”, said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “We are very excited to partner with Ikkjin and impressed by his long-term product vision”.


Archive
- October 2024(44)
- September 2024(94)
- August 2024(100)
- July 2024(99)
- June 2024(126)
- May 2024(155)
- April 2024(123)
- March 2024(112)
- February 2024(109)
- January 2024(95)
- December 2023(56)
- November 2023(86)
- October 2023(97)
- September 2023(89)
- August 2023(101)
- July 2023(104)
- June 2023(113)
- May 2023(103)
- April 2023(93)
- March 2023(129)
- February 2023(77)
- January 2023(91)
- December 2022(90)
- November 2022(125)
- October 2022(117)
- September 2022(137)
- August 2022(119)
- July 2022(99)
- June 2022(128)
- May 2022(112)
- April 2022(108)
- March 2022(121)
- February 2022(93)
- January 2022(110)
- December 2021(92)
- November 2021(107)
- October 2021(101)
- September 2021(81)
- August 2021(74)
- July 2021(78)
- June 2021(92)
- May 2021(67)
- April 2021(79)
- March 2021(79)
- February 2021(58)
- January 2021(55)
- December 2020(56)
- November 2020(59)
- October 2020(78)
- September 2020(72)
- August 2020(64)
- July 2020(71)
- June 2020(74)
- May 2020(50)
- April 2020(71)
- March 2020(71)
- February 2020(58)
- January 2020(62)
- December 2019(57)
- November 2019(64)
- October 2019(25)
- September 2019(24)
- August 2019(14)
- July 2019(23)
- June 2019(54)
- May 2019(82)
- April 2019(76)
- March 2019(71)
- February 2019(67)
- January 2019(75)
- December 2018(44)
- November 2018(47)
- October 2018(74)
- September 2018(54)
- August 2018(61)
- July 2018(72)
- June 2018(62)
- May 2018(62)
- April 2018(73)
- March 2018(76)
- February 2018(8)
- January 2018(7)
- December 2017(6)
- November 2017(8)
- October 2017(3)
- September 2017(4)
- August 2017(4)
- July 2017(2)
- June 2017(5)
- May 2017(6)
- April 2017(11)
- March 2017(8)
- February 2017(16)
- January 2017(10)
- December 2016(12)
- November 2016(20)
- October 2016(7)
- September 2016(102)
- August 2016(168)
- July 2016(141)
- June 2016(149)
- May 2016(117)
- April 2016(59)
- March 2016(85)
- February 2016(153)
- December 2015(150)