French in-game ad startup Gadsme raises $8m seed round to scale growth

French in-game ad startup Gadsme raises $8m seed round to scale growth

Published: 08-04-2022 14:24:00 | By: Pie Kamau | hits: 3874 | Tags:

Gadsme, the interactive adtech platform that offers high quality immersive brand experiences through in-game advertising, secured an $8 million seed investment just 11 months after launch. With investors including Galaxy Interactive and Ubisoft, Gadsme will use the funding to structure and invest in key people to scale the business to meet demand.

With Gadsme, Immersive Ads are now dynamically served and its unique technical capabilities enable, for the first time, true performance campaigns that benefit all advertisers, across all platforms. With more than 3 billion players worldwide, each playing their favorite games for many hours, trillions of ad impressions are now available. Unlike full screen video display or interstitial ad formats, that can interrupt the game playing experience, Gadsme focuses on non-intrusive ad formats that are blended, immersed and native to the gameplay.

Those ad formats run across every game genre, all devices and geographies, and are particularly sought after by brand advertisers, who demand Gadsme’ guaranteed brand-safe environments and privacy compliant targeting capabilities. Gadsme was created in 2019 by digital media experts Guillaume Monteux and Luc Vauvillier, whose previous company miLibris was sold to the Altice Group. Making up the trinity of the founding team is ex-AppLovin VP Corporate Development, Simon Spaull who played an important part in AppLovin’s monumental growth.

This seed investment was strategically and selectively built from a pool of gaming and digital experts that believe in the Gadsme vision, and who also bring a wealth of experience and targeted expertise to develop the product and customer experience further. For Ubisoft, they first started to work with Gadsme before securing a strategic investment into the business, confirming market quality of Gadsme’s platform and the opportunity the sector presents. The gaming market was recently valued at $134 billion, cementing games as the new media of choice for brands.

Guillaume Monteux, CEO and Co-founder, Gadsme: ''For more than 2 years, we three co-founders bootstrapped the company to build the most technically advanced Immersive Ads solution. When some of the best game companies in the world concurred, we knew we were ready to raise the money to grow. For our seed round we wanted to find partners that could bring vast knowledge and expertise into our business. Not just provide capital, but genuine experiences and learnings in the exact industry we operate in. With Galaxy Interactive, alongside other major games company founders as shareholders, we’re now poised and ready to execute on our vision.''

Gadsme’s immersive SDK is already integrated into a number of premium game studios, including Lion Studios, Ubisoft, Tilting Point, TapNation and Voodoo, offering brand-safe and prime quality-controlled ads to a large audience.

Sam Englebardt, CEO, Galaxy Interactive: ''We’d met various companies in the in-game Ad space, but Gadsme's product and team really resonated with our beliefs and our vision. Guillaume and his team are a natural fit with our client portfolio, and their attention to detail, unique approach, and laser-focused vision capture what we believe to be the right path forward. We’re excited by the space and look forward to helping Gadsme on their quest to put the player experience first in connecting brands with passionate audiences. These intersections will continue to play an important role in this new digital frontier, and we believe that the Gadsme team can make true impact.''

www.gadsme.com