Mid-market private equity firm LDC has made a significant investment in Blis, a global programmatic advertising company, to support its international growth plans.
Blis, an integrated media planning and buying platform, doesn’t rely on personal data. It says it builds audiences using accurate, consented location data combined with a broad range of rich and powerful anonymised datasets, giving it the deepest audience understanding available.
The company has an international team of more than 240 people working for some of the world’s largest and most customer-driven companies. Having grown rapidly over the last five years, revenues hit around £60m this year.
LDC is backing the existing management team led by CEO Greg Isbister. The private equity firm is supporting their growth plans to invest in new product development, broaden its service offering and expand the team across Europe, the USA and Asia-Pacific.
MarTech 50 – UK’s most innovative marketing technology creators for 2022
The investment will enable Blis to double its headcount over the next few years.
LDC’s John Green and David Andrews will join the board alongside Isbister, CFO Parm Dhami and industry heavy-weight John Farrell, who joins Blis as non-executive chair.
With more than 25 years’ experience, Farrell has led some of the world’s biggest marketing services brands and was the former president and CEO of Publicis Group’s specialised agencies and marketing services arm.
“I’m really excited to have LDC as an investor in the business – they clearly understand the opportunity ahead of us and back our vision to accelerate our growth in this exciting space,” said Isbister.
“They bring a huge amount of sector expertise across their broad portfolio and have a straight talking and down to earth approach.”
Tech entrepreneur calls for kindness as administrations are set to rise