MAX Raises $3.5 Million to Bring the Market’s First Programmatic Enablement Platform to Mobile Publishers

SAN FRANCISCO, April 26, 2018 -- MAX, the market’s first programmatic enablement platform for mobile publishers, today announced that it has closed a $3.5 million round of seed funding. The financing was led by Breakpoint Capital, an early stage investment fund founded by Jim Payne, former CEO and co-founder of MoPub, which sold to Twitter in 2013 for $350 million. Prominent mobile publishers Miniclip and MobilityWare also joined the round. The company will use the funding to bring to market its enterprise-grade ads management platform that allows mobile publishers to build and run their own real-time bidding (RTB) exchanges. The MAX platform is now generally available to mobile publishers.

MAX will now look to grow its business with the help and support of two of the most successful mobile game developers of all time. The company is led by CEO and former early MoPub employee, Dan Sack, along with a team of former MoPub core contributors. MAX is already working with many of the market’s largest publishers, including The Meet Group, TheChive, Timehop, and Grindr, as well as more than 25 of the market’s biggest buyers – a mix of software development kit (SDK) networks, demand-side platforms (DSPs), and exchanges.

"We built the MAX platform to provide mobile publishers with a fresh solution for today’s increasingly programmatic ecosystem and to address head-on the inefficiency, clunkiness, and excessive fees of current sell-side platforms (SSPs) and exchanges," said Sack. "With MAX, mobile publishers are able to extract more revenue from their most important buyers and build cleaner, faster, more transparent ad stacks.”

Through MAX, publishers are able to run auctions that collect real-time cost per mille (CPM) bids from connected buyers, including SDK networks. This competition increases prices for publisher inventory and reduces publisher dependence on slow, static, operationally heavy waterfall systems that allocate traffic based on historical data in a fixed sequence.

MAX allows publishers to form direct, low-fee commercial relationships with any programmatic buyer, a cost-effective alternative to accessing this same spend through high-fee RTB exchanges that take significant revenue share from publishers and buyers. By implementing MAX alongside their existing ad stacks, publishers are able to generate incremental revenue without disrupting their current ads infrastructure or revenue streams.

“MAX gives publishers the ability to move their entire mobile ads stack to a programmatic enabled approach and move beyond the waterfall. This ensures that a publisher can easily find the optimal buyer for each impression, especially as buyers increasingly use audience-based and data-driven acquisition strategies. I am thrilled to be working with Dan and his team on such an important and impactful product,” said Payne.

MAX will use this round of funding to grow its team (job openings here) and accelerate adoption of the MAX platform. For more information, please get in touch with the MAX team at [email protected].

About MAX
MAX is the first programmatic enablement platform for today's mobile publisher and programmatic advertising ecosystem. Ushering in the next-generation of mobile monetization, MAX was founded in 2017 by the same team that brought programmatic to mobile. Building on this experience and visionary leadership, MAX was created to bring new efficiencies and revenue opportunities to mobile publishers. Learn why market-leading mobile publishers and buyers are choosing MAX, visit: http://www.maxads.io/.

About Breakpoint Capital
Breakpoint Capital invests in entrepreneurs who are building the next generation of world changing technology companies. Founded in 2018 by Jim Payne, co-founder and CEO of MoPub, we provide not just capital, but also access to our expertise in product development, recruiting and corporate strategy. As entrepreneurs, we know how difficult building a company from scratch can be. Our goal is to make it easier. Breakpoint invests at the seed stage of company development.

Media Contact:
April H. Burghardt
PR Consultant for MAX
646-246-0484
[email protected]