Type of business Privately held company Industry Mobile Advertising Launched 2011 Type Privately held company | Area served Global Website drawbridge.com Founded 2011 | |
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Key people Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan (CEO)Devin Guan (CTO)Winston Crawford (COO)Rahul Bafna (VP of Product)Brian Ferrario (VP Marketing)J Ravi Menon (Founding Engineer) CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan (Nov 2010–) Founders Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, J Ravi Menon Profiles | ||
Drawbridge is a company in the programmatic advertising industry, operating out of San Mateo, California, USA. Drawbridge has built a cross-device advertising platform that specializes in using machine learning to match individuals across connected devices, including desktops, smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs, in order to serve more relevant ads across devices.
Contents
History
Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, a former AdMob scientist, built the technology that allowed her to pair users to devices in late 2010 and formed Adsymptotic, which is now known as Drawbridge. In 2014, the company announced support for video ads and updated its analytics suite to gives marketers insights on multi-touch attribution and information on their audiences across devices.
Technology
At a high level, Drawbridge probabilistically determines whether two devices are used by the same person by analyzing various events occurring on the devices and the attributes that those events yield.
In other words, Drawbridge observes a user's activities, primarily through the proxy of ads served to various devices (mobile device or desktop web), which gives them an ID. Since IDs are different across all the devices a user may interact with, Drawbridge then computes a confidence-score based on the likelihood that IDs from different sources belong to the same person or identity.
Reception
Most mainstream media outlets have been fairly receptive to Drawbridge's pairing technology. Predictably, technology focused media outlets have been borderline laudatory in their coverage while some blogs have voiced concerns that the technology is invasive and could lead to breaches of privacy.
Financials
Drawbridge has received funding from Sequoia Capital, and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.
In 2016 the company announced the close of its $25M Series C round of financing, led by Sequoia Capital.