Singapore-based Infomo is raising $30 million with the help of American investment advisory firm Cohen & Co Capital Markets. The artificial intelligence (AI) ad tech start-up claims to fulfill the requirements of telecom companies for an in-house privacy-compliant solution that provides first-party data and ID, which can replace the soon-to-disappear cookie system. 

Infomo was founded in 2018 by ex-Infosys Australia Head Ananda Rao and corporate and investment professional Peter Jermyn. In addition to India, it has offices across Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam, with plans to expand into the US, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. It recently appointed Himanka Das as Country Director in India and promoted Rohit Verma to Global Chief of Strategy and New Initiatives.

By combining telco ID and data with AI-based advertising optimization tools, Infomo offers turnkey in-housing solutions for ad agencies, publishers, brands and SMEs that can improve ad targeting while promising privacy protection through anonymization. This allows these groups to set up their white-labeled advertising platforms while reducing their dependence on alternatives like Google and Google lookalikes and offering them the option to provide personalized internet experiences without getting personal.

Ananda Rao, managing director and group chief executive officer (CEO) of Infomo, revealed that the company is finalising engagements with multiple telecom carriers and hopes to have over 10 telco relationships across 23 countries by the end of Q3 of this calendar year. He explained that this equates to reaching 1.25 billion mobile subscribers, or 15 per cent of the global base, over the next nine months. Infomo partnered with one telecom carrier in India, Vodafone, five months ago and is actively working to sign up a couple more. It will also go live with another telco in Indonesia soon. 

In 2021, the start-up entered into a strategic merger with adtech platform TorcAI to enable its alliance partners to offer an integrated ecosystem that addresses the emerging needs of large publishers, publisher consortiums, telecom carriers, agencies, and brands across the global marketplace.

Telecom carriers have a checkered history within digital marketing, with a few even acquiring adtech start-ups to compete with Google and other social media platforms. 

In 2012, Singapore Telecommunications acquired US-based mobile advertising solutions provider Amobee for $321 million to expand its presence into the rapidly growing mobile advertising industry against the backdrop of falling revenues from voice services. Last year, it divested this digital media and advertising subsidiary to London-based advertising technology firm Tremor International for an enterprise valuation of $239 million.

In 2015, US telecom giant Verizon acquired AOL, and the latter bought mobile ad tech company Millennial Media within three months of this acquisition. In 2017, Verizon acquired Yahoo's operating business for approximately $4.83 billion, as part of the telco's comprehensive shift into online media, specifically around adtech. However, four years later, it sold both these media assets to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion. 

In 2018, AT&T bought global ad marketplace AppNexus, later renamed Xandr, for reportedly $2 billion. It wanted to build on the latter's technology and integrate it with its first-party data, premium video content and distribution. Two years later, it included Xandr within WarnerMedia and in 2021, Microsoft MSFT announced its intent to acquire Xandr. 

The reason behind these instances is not due to the omniscience of Google and its lookalikes in the digital marketing ecosystem but also underpins the challenges telecom carriers encounter with respect to data residency, data compliance and justifying RoI. Merely acquiring an ad tech company is unlikely to make them successful in offering digital marketing solutions.

"Within the open internet, Google and Google lookalike cloud-based ecosystems operate with value chains comprising select modules. These include the advertiser, the trading desk-demand side platform with data from a data management platform, the media exchange, supply side platform and the publisher," Rao stated. 

The demand side platform provides the data for targeting, which anchors the whole supply chain. Additionally, there exist many handshakes between various modules within the Google and Google lookalike ecosystems. "This is a near-opaque pure play media buy-sell ecosystem where only media is auctioned and post-campaign results are available via dashboards," he added.

To overcome this challenge, Infomo offers media coupled with data on an impression basis to media buyers. Rao noted that since it is built ground up, data-sensitive components are in-housed inside a telecom carrier. 

"The transparent ecosystem offers two data types—for targeting and from real-time bidding (RTB) auctions. This differentiating factor is the currency and granularity of telco data," he elaborated. This allows telcos to leverage the potential of their rich data properly. Moreover, comprehensive telco data can become a single data source for agencies and brands leveraging multiple channels like online search, social media and industry reports to plan their media buying.

However, can Infomo ensure that it doesn't fall into the monopolistic trap as contemporary search platforms, where it controls the exchange of ads from both ends of the ad-serving spectrum? Rao is confident about this since the buying end is controlled by demand-side platforms that work within telcos. 

"The Infomo ION media+data exchange is a transparent exchange bringing in supply from various publishers. The advertisers and publishers have access to real-time bidding data and AI/ML-based algorithms to participate with dynamic bids," he emphasised, adding that this optimized supply path will lead to the transparency of revenue share and data security.