Kevel Reimagines How Brands Monetize with Digital Ads

Kevel’s vision is that most publishers will want to build custom, in-house ad products, like Amazon and Facebook have done. To date, doing that is difficult, as third-party tools are inadequate, and it could take years to do in-house. That is why Kevel exists: to provide tools that make it easy to build custom ad platforms for sponsored listings, native ads, internal promotions, and more, thereby driving new revenue and taking back the internet from the monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

We began in 2010, but started off catering to small businesses. As time progressed, we realized our product was unique enough to wade into the enterprise market. By 2016, as a company of 15, we signed major companies like Ticketmaster, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Imgur.

This spoke to the talents and dedication of the team of course, but also to our market-fit; brands were eager to monetize their sites and apps with new revenue streams, but they didn’t trust Google and didn’t have the resources to build an ad platform in-house. They trusted us, even though we were small, because we brought a new approach to an old problem.

In the last few years, our revenue has reflected this fit. While we were ~$3M in total revenue in 2016, we ended 2020 at $10M in total revenue, while remaining profitable.

In the past year, our progress has only accelerated. We’ve furthered entered into the B2B enterprise space with signings from United, Mozilla, OfferUp, and Monster — all to power innovative ad platforms that will drive more money for them. For instance, with United we are powering their sponsored getaways on their homepage; for Monster it is sponsored job listings in search results; and for Mozilla it is native ads in their pocket product.

This has culminated in a $11M Series A in December of 2020. The goal of this round was to give Kevel the resources to hire and scale out its product offerings.