Gadsme, the first In-Game AdTech Platform allowing performance advertising, raises $8m in seed round

Popular industry seed round led by Galaxy Interactive is also joined by major game publishers, including Ubisoft.

AppLovin’s ex-VP Corporate Development Co-Founds Gadsme – a platform that is set to take AdTech into the Metaverse and backed by strategic multi-million-dollar investment from games industry giants

Gadsme, the only interactive AdTech platform that offers high quality immersive brand experiences through in-game advertising, has secured an $8m 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. To further enhance their potential, Gadsme focuses its development exclusively on high quality inventory and games.

With more than 3 billion players worldwide, each playing their favorite games for many hours, trillions of ad impressions are available. Unlike full screen video display or interstitial ad formats, that can interrupt the 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’s 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.

“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, Ubisoft and other major games company founders as shareholders, we’re now poised and ready to execute on our vision.” said Guillaume Monteux, CEO & Co-Founder.

The result of their cooperation is Gadsme: Built, tested, and reworked into an innovative core product that is grounded in market-leading technology and now has unrivaled industry support with multi-million-dollar investments from some of the most well-known games publishers in the world. Gadsme’s immersive SDK is already integrated into a number of premium game studios, including Voodoo, Ubisoft, Tilting Point, TapNation and Lion Studios, offering brand-safe and prime quality-controlled ads to a large audience.

“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” said Galaxy Interactive’s CEO, Sam Englebardt.

“Our cross-platform technology has been extremely carefully crafted to provide studios with a long-term partnership to drive continuous and new incremental revenues from their games. Whilst in-game advertising has been a subject for 20+ years, today we could see a clear opportunity in the marketplace to build something pristine and different, that drives revenue and measurable brand engagement In-Game.” said Simon Spaull, CRO and Co-Founder.

“Gadsme is the only In-Game company in the world that can run performance ads inside games, giving all brands the unique opportunity to measure KPIs, whilst attracting an audience within the walled gardens of games, but also allows studios to run cross-promotion to any other game in their portfolio. This is entirely unique and an important new business opportunity for the gaming ecosystem. Our technology fully integrates brand advertising into the gameplay experience with Immersive Ads that are dynamic, content targeted and serving positive experiences to players. We’re excited to see how the AdTech industry will develop further in 2022 and to be a key player in connecting studios and brands.” Spaull adds.

Gadsme’s product offers the same high quality, positive experience to brands and studios alike. Its patented technology for ad viewability is unique to the games industry, ensuring transparency and reliable reach for brands, whilst the combination of an intuitive self-serve platform and smooth SDK integration has ensured an overwhelmingly positive experience for developers. Gadsme’s next-generation platform has been engineered in-house for over 2 years, is metaverse-ready and uniquely placed to offer a variety of solutions to maximize results for advertisers and gaming studios alike.

Luc Vauvillier, CTO and Co-Founder adds “We knew exactly how to develop our product to ensure stability and success. We heard the many tech challenges studios had faced with In-Game ad platforms previously. From inception, our goal was to ensure our product was stable, reliable and fit for purpose. Our in-house architecture is ready for any and all future gaming and metaverse advertising opportunities”.

Gadsme is known for its technical excellence, now it is laser focused on delivering unbeatable returns to gaming companies, as well as driving superior ROAS to advertisers.