Adwisely, a startup founded in Ukraine in 2018 — previously known as Retarget App — is making its way in Silicon Valley. Six months after moving its headquarters there, with a team of Ukrainian pros distributed across the world, the company has just announced the completion of a $1.5 million round of funding.
London-based TMT Investments led the round, with participation from Cabra VC, Gaingels, ICU Ventures, Mana Venture, and a group of angel investors, including Wrike founder Andrew Filev.
This investor pool is diverse — not only with regards to Gaingels, which is the leading LGBTQIA+/Allies investment syndicate in the USA, but also in an international perspective. Filev, as well as key members of the TMT and Cabra teams, are Russian or Russian-born nationals living abroad, while ICU Ventures is a major asset management and investment firm based in Kyiv.
Adwisely has developed an ad automation platform for e-commerce to run campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Google. It enables direct-to-consumer brands to make “smart, automated ad buying decisions based on big data assets collected from thousands of their customers.”
Adwisely offers an alternative to hiring an advertising agency, which many e-commerce SMBs cannot afford. The startup says its solution is used by “15,000 online stores from the USA, Canada, France, the UK and Australia.”
“While ad costs are spiraling by 15-400% across sectors, the Adwisely platform delivers ROAS (return on ad spend) that is 2x higher than market benchmarks, and costs up to 10x cheaper than traditional ad agencies,” claims the startup.
Adwisely has raised $3.9 million in total so far, including $1.2 million in 2019 and $1.2 million in 2020.
Adwisely says it will use the latest funding to “integrate with more advertising platforms such as TikTok, Pinterest and Twitter, before raising Series A later this year.”
