Artificial intelligence and machine learning-based technology company, Topsort, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Upload Ventures and returning seed round investors, Quiet Capital and Pear Ventures. The Series A round sees the company valued at $150 million.
Topsort will use this round of funding to further scale its clean advertising platform that’s free of third-party cookie tracking and privacy-invasive data. The Topsort platform is fueled by similar AI and ML models that power platforms in the 2020s AI revolution. Essentially a large “prediction machine”, Topsort works on a self-learning algorithm, using human feedback to maintain a constant state of improvement.
Through its retail media platform and customizable APIs, Topsort enables retailers and marketplaces to run effective ad campaigns with high returns. The commerce and media-focused, easy-to-use clean room is one-of-a-kind, encrypted technology with zero-visibility into privacy data – not even Topsort can see it.
Topsort also offers one-click sponsored listings across onsite searches with total return on advertising spend (ROAS) control. This enables retailers and brands to uncover valuable insights while respecting privacy with compliant, anonymous data matching.
Founded in 2021, Topsort is led by CEO and co-founder Regina Ye, a former beauty brand seller turned advertising disruptor, CTO and co-founder Francisco Larrain, a serial entrepreneur who had two exits including one from Groupon and led its engineering in its heyday, and co-founder and Chief Scientist, Michael Ostrovsky, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a world-renowned economist on auction theory, game theory, and marketplace design.
Topsort CEO and co-founder Regina Ye commented: “This funding round is further fueling our mission to accelerate the clean advertising revolution using AI and new age machine learning technology. Only one part of what’s to come is the democratization of auction-based advertising technology into Bidless formats, which previously had a much higher bar of entry and amassed an insane amount of profit for some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.
“With Topsort, we hope to democratize the access to KPI-driven, efficient and transparent media in the new age of post-cookies to both enterprise retailers, top brands and agencies, as well as small,long-tail sellers alike. Advertisers of all shapes and sizes can benefit from a highly profitable ad business that works for everyone within the ecosystem.”
Since its inception just a few years ago, Topsort has earned the trust of major retailers, marketplaces and brands, including Poshmark, Cencosud, Unilever, Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, General Mills, Glovo (part of Delivery Hero), Phillips and many more. It previously raised $8.6 million in a seed round in 2022.
