CBS Sports, CNBC, Gannett, Hearst, NASCAR, New York Post, Paramount,
Rotten Tomatoes, USA Today Sports,
And Thousands More Use Admiral To Grow 1st-Party Visitor
Relationships, Data, and Revenue
NEW
YORK, Aug. 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/
-- Admiral, The Visitor Relationship Management (VRM)
Company, today announced the successful close of $19M in growth equity and debt funding, led by
Harbert Growth Partners, the growth equity team of Harbert
Management Corporation (HMC), joined by Bridge Bank and
others. This latest funding, coupled with previous equity and debt,
brings Admiral's total capital raised to $28M, with Admiral funding partners including
Birchmere Ventures, Gulfshore Capital, Florida
Opportunity Fund, and media publisher Capitol
Broadcasting.
Harbert has a proven track record of identifying and funding
industry leading software companies, including AI-powered customer
experience platform Clarabridge (acquired by Qualtrics), location
based intelligence software platform MapAnything (acquired by
Salesforce) and field service software platform Payzer (acquired by
WEX). Bridge Bank has been helping innovators in the tech sector
bring industry-leading ideas to their next stage of development,
from startup to IPO and beyond, for more than 20 years.
With this infusion, Admiral will serve publishers even better
with larger Revenue, Product, and Customer Love teams, expand
internationally, and build on its lead in AI-powered marketing
automation for media publishers, copyright access control, and
1st-party data innovations. Harbert's and Bridge Bank's funding and
strategic resources will help Admiral grow publisher revenue
worldwide.
Admiral's Visitor Relationship Management platform builds
relationships, revenue, and retention for thousands of premium
publishers and networks worldwide including CNBC,
Hearst, New York
Post, Paramount, Rotten Tomatoes, USA Today Sports, and more. Described as
marketing automation for media publishers, Admiral draws
inspiration from B2B SaaS giants such as Hubspot, Drift, and
Salesforce, applying inbound marketing principles on a B2C level to
help sites engage site visitors and maximize revenue. Admiral's
AI-powered VRM modules include:
- Measure: Revenue Analytics
- Recover: Adblock Recovery
- Transact: Paid Subscriptions, Donations,
Memberships
- Connect: 1st-Party Data Collection, Segmentation, and
Activation
- Convert: Email Acquisition, Registration, Social Growth,
Mobile Downloads, & Content Recommendation
- Consent: CMP (GDPR/GPP)
"We're pleased to partner with Admiral to provide them with a
flexible and customized venture debt solution," said
Blake Reid, senior director,
in Bridge Bank's Technology Banking Group. "We look forward to
supporting Admiral in their mission to provide visitor relationship
management tools and expertise to help publishers navigate the
evolving digital landscape toward The Authenticated Web."
Last week, Admiral announced a partnership with The Trade Desk's
OpenPass. The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) has their own successful
history of working with Bridge Bank. The bank played a contributing
role to The Trade Desk's growth, ultimately resulting in their IPO
in 2016.
Admiral also completed a strategic move to bolster its
leadership team, adding Wayne
Hunter, Managing Partner of Harbert Growth Partners, and
Birchmere Partner Sean
Ammirati, former COO of ReadWriteWeb and Founder/CEO of
mSpoke (acquired by LinkedIn), to its Board of Directors.
"We followed Admiral's progress for years and kept seeing more
top media brands adopt their solution," said Wayne Hunter, Managing Partner of Harbert Growth
Partners. "General purpose marketing automation platforms like
Hubspot, Salesforce, and Adobe Marketing Cloud aren't built to help
media publishers grow 1st-party visitor relationships, data, and
revenue, so Admiral's AI-powered VRM is filling the gap
quickly."
"The core business model of the Internet is shifting from an
adtech paradigm to a martech paradigm — The Authenticated Web — and
publishers need help, fast," said Dan
Rua, CEO and co-founder, Admiral. "Relationships drive
revenue, and publishers that embrace that reality will survive and
thrive for decades to come. The key is delivering the right offer,
to the right visitor, at the right time, and AI-powered VRM makes
that possible with zero dev lift. We couldn't have hoped for a
better lead partner than Harbert at this stage in Admiral's
journey. We're incredibly proud of the team and what we've
accomplished for our customers, but we've still got plenty of work
ahead."
"Admiral predicted the importance of visitor relationship
management ahead of much of the industry," said Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO of Beeler.tech
and Head of Ad Operations at Golf.com. "With Google now throwing
their weight behind 'user choice', Admiral's strength in visitor
journeys and 1st-party data will help more publishers than ever.
I'm excited to see smart money flow to such a quality team and
publisher-first mission."
To learn more about Admiral Visitor Relationship Management,
please visit https://getadmiral.com.
About Admiral
Admiral (https://www.getadmiral.com/) the Visitor Relationship
Management (VRM) Company, helps thousands of digital publishers
worldwide grow visitor relationships and revenue. Admiral's
AI-powered SaaS platform solves several monetization challenges
digital publishers face, with visitor journeys that include:
registration walls, paywalls and paid subscriptions, donation
management, advanced adblock analytics and revenue recovery,
GDPR/GPP privacy consent, email acquisition, 1P data collection,
social growth, and more.
About Harbert Management Corporation and Harbert Growth
Partners
Harbert Management Corporation is an alternative asset manager with
approximately $8.0 billion in
Regulatory Assets Under Management as of July 31, 2023. Formed in 1993, the firm is
privately owned and serves foundations and endowments, fund of
funds, pension funds, financial institutions, insurance companies,
family offices, and high net worth individuals across multiple
asset classes. Investment strategies include European and U.S. real
estate, seniors housing, U.S. growth capital, credit solutions,
infrastructure, and absolute return funds. For additional
information about HMC visit, www.harbert.net.
Harbert Growth Partners ("HGP") seeks to generate superior
returns for their investors by identifying and investing in
promising emerging growth stage technology companies. The HGP
Investment Team combines substantial investment, advisory, and
operating experience with capital and networking contacts to
support great entrepreneurial teams in successfully executing their
growth plans. Currently investing out of HGP V, HGP's prior funds
include exits to a distinguished list of strategic acquirers
including, among others, Amazon, GE, GSK, Medallia, Philips,
Qualtrics, Salesforce, Sophos, Target and WEX. For more
information, visit: www.harbert.net
About Bridge Bank
Bridge Bank, a division of Western
Alliance Bank, Member FDIC, delivers relationship banking that puts
clients at the center of everything. Founded in 2001 in Silicon
Valley, Bridge Bank offers a full spectrum of tailored commercial
banking solutions with specialized expertise focused on life
sciences and technology and innovation companies at every stage in
their life cycle, from startup to IPO and beyond. With offices in
major tech hubs across the country, Bridge Bank delivers the reach,
resources and market expertise that make a difference for its
clients. Bridge Bank also serves the private equity and venture
capital communities by providing banking solutions for portfolio
companies and funds, plus banking solutions for small to mid-size
businesses in the Bay Area. Bridge Bank is part of Western Alliance
Bancorporation, which has more than $80
billion in assets. Major accolades include being ranked as a
top U.S. bank in 2023 by American Banker and Bank Director. For
more information, visit Bridge Bank.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Lane Buschel
TrueStoryPR for Admiral
382104@email4pr.com
Michael Yeon
Admiral PR
382104@email4pr.com
View original content to download
multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/admiral-secures-19m-in-new-funding-led-by-harbert-growth-partners-reaching-28m-total-raised-to-save-the-free-internet-one-publisher-at-a-time-302226880.html
SOURCE Innovation Institute for Fan Experience, LLC