• Startup Vinyl Trading Desk Raises $750K to Simplify Video Buying

    Startup Vinyl Trading Desk, founded by longtime Altitude Digital COO Devin Yeager, has raised an initial round of $750K from FastPay. Devin told me in a briefing that Vinyl’s platform unifies and simplifies ad buying across video, search and social for clients starting with budgets as little as $1,500. The new funds will be used mainly for product development and building sales and marketing staff.

    Devin noted Vinyl’s emphasis on transparency is rooted in his market research indicating that smaller advertisers were missing out on the potential of video because they couldn’t clearly see the results. Vinyl’s algorithm is meant to allocate ad budgets across video, search and social based on the advertiser’s specific goals.

    Devin said that Vinyl is betting that ad dollars will continue to shift to programmatic buying, with an emphasis on data-enabled platforms to scale up. One of Vinyl’s key differentiators will be transparency, an area that Devin said his market research indicated smaller advertisers weren’t satisfied with in their Google and Facebook buys.

    Vinyl has a team of 8 currently and is expanding using the new funds.