The company hopes to benefit from the rising $45 billion retail media market, which is generating significant advertising revenue for retailers, thanks in part to the success of Amazon’s high-margin ad business.
Symbiosys focuses on assisting shops in selling off-site advertising promoting brand products—ads that appear in areas such as Google search or Instagram.
The goal is to better coordinate the two sides’ performance marketing efforts, providing brands with a better approach to drive visitors to retailer sites by leveraging first-party measurement data, while also assisting retailers in scaling their retail media networks.
Symbiosys provides real-time reporting and analytics. It also has innovative collaborative bidding technology, which allows merchants and brands to compete for off-site product ad campaigns.
The company’s customers include a number of major retailers, according to CEO and founder Bashar Kachachi, a former Google advertising leader who also spent more than a decade at Microsoft working on ad-related products.
Symbiosys’ other executives include President John Roswech, a former chief revenue officer at Marchex and HookLogic, and engineering leader Dan Cooke, who has previously worked at Criteo, HookLogic, and WorldQuant.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company employs more than 20 people. The total funding to date is $11.5 million.
Other investors include Jonathan Opdyke, co-founder of HookLogic, and Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel Digital. Scott Friend, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, funded as an individual angel.
