Honeycomb, a TV and advertising management platform, has raised £3 million in Series A round of funding led by Beringea.
Leading the Series A is U.K. and U.S.-based VC Beringea, along with a number of individuals from the worlds of television and advertising. The latter includes David Bell (a senior adviser to AOL and Verizon, and former Senior Advisor to Google), Richard Jameson (the former CFO of brand services company Tag-worldwide), and John Spearman (Chairman of visual effects company Framestore).
It is currently available in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Holland, and will use the new funding to roll-out the platform into an additional 11 markets including the US.
Launched in August this year, Honeycomb is a relatively young startup and was founded by James Carpenter and Richard Carter, who both previously founded Adstream. It is a TV and video ad management platform that comes with the objective to increase transparency in the current advertising delivery process, and it achieves this by automating elements of input and data sharing throughout the delivery chain. Till date, it has managed to raise £4 million in total funding, the rest of the £1 million having been raised in a “friends and family” round in May this year.
By making use of Honeycomb’s tech, creative agencies and post production houses can submit content in about half of the time or less, while the possibility of human error is reduced significantly. Its other key selling point is that, unlike leading competitors, including Carpenter and Carter’s former company Adstream, it charges the same amount for HD or SD content, so advertisers don’t need to compromise on picture quality.
James Carpenter, founder of Honeycomb, commenting on the recent round of funding said,
The investment from Beringea serves to endorse our approach, our strategy and our overall goals. Our streamlined model has already made an impact in Europe with new customers signing up everyday since we launched less than two months ago. This show of confidence provides the solid foundation we need as we set our sights on the rest of the world.
He also went on to say that Honeycomb would seek to lay the groundwork for programmatic TV, essentially a more targeted and automated method of audience-based ad purchasing, adding,
This is a widely talked about but unrealised concept. But with the support of our partner clients, our individual investors, and now Beringea, we have the capability to bring this technology to market in the near future.
Maria Wagner, an investment director at Beringea UK, outlined the exciting investment opportunity that Honeycomb constitutes for the firm,
We’re proud to be involved with this impressive team and look forward to supporting them on their exciting journey and international expansion.
