California based adtech startup Moloco turns unicorn with a valuation of more than $1 billion. Its latest funding round saw participation from Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global Management.

The company raised $150 million from the Series C funding round which is valued at $1.5 billion.

“We invested in Moloco because its machine-learning algorithms have proven to be among the best available,” John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global, said. “The volume of digital data produced is growing exponentially yet the tools available for taking action on that data remain relatively limited.”

In 2013, Ikkjin Ahn founded Moloco Inc., an advertising technology company. According to its Series C funding statement, Moloco delivers more than 13 billion ad impressions a month on mobile apps. Its customers include the video-sharing platform TikTok, which now has more than 1 billion users every month.

According to Ahn, Moloco’s revenue has doubled every year and was about $180 million last year. The company first received a profit in the first quarter of 2020 and has more than 200 employees.

Ahn said that targeted ads can be unsettling at times when badly done, but if they are done well they can help customers “find products or services that they might not otherwise discover.”

James Cooper, director of Business of Apps, says Moloco has room to expand its business.

“Moloco’s challenge is to scale up its brand and sales team across multiple international markets” and in multiple areas such as games and e-commerce, he said. But he said the company's approach has the potential to be successful.
Moloco is looking to list shares on the Nasdaq in the next two or three years, Ahn said. He said he’s been travelling frequently among the company's eight global offices, even during the pandemic.

“The jet lag is sometimes quite painful,” he said. “But I don’t stress out often,” he said. Moloco may be much smaller than Google and Facebook, but it has established a profitable business model and is headed in the right direction, he said.