Regular Ad servers do not work with email, but Passendo’s award-winning email Ad serving platform helps publishers of newsletters increase revenue, launch campaigns and control content and quality.

The funding the startup has received is from two international investors, Dutch Newion and British FirstPartyCapital, and it is not the first time the company gets significant investments.

“There are teams that create tomorrow’s opportunities and then there are teams that transform the world of yesterday. Passendo does both: they use the latest generation of advertising opportunities along with the oldest and largest application on the Internet – email. We are happy to support this talented and experienced team with the first of many future investments in Denmark!”, says John Sjölander, partner at Newion.

“Passendo offers a targeted solution that neither Google nor other AdTech companies can provide, giving publishers and marketers access to a unique email Ad platform and great measurement opportunities. We are very impressed with the team and we look forward to working with them to build a global winner in this area,” says Rich Ashton, managing partner at FirstPartyCapital.

The startup has currently over 4 000 leading media groups and publishers internationally as its customers. Among the Nordic customers you will find Bonnier Publications, which uses Passendo’s technology throughout the Nordic region, and Saxo Bank, which uses it for advertising.

“This investment will directly benefit our customers. Now we can continue to develop world-class technology and at the same time continue to build strategic partnerships with recognized partners. This is important as we aim to become the leading global email Ad serving platform”, says Anders Ratzau Rasmussen, COO and co-founder of Passendo.

Many international financial news outlets prefer Passendo’s technology as well. The same goes for large foreign media houses like Roularta, Springer Nature, IPM Media and Reach, which use Passendo’s platform to effectively manage their newsletter campaigns. German Ebner today spends 80% less time managing their campaigns after the implementation of Passendo’s platform.

“The partnerships with Newion and FirstPartyCapital will undoubtedly help us on our way to a leading position in the market. In addition to their investment, they give us access to a lot of knowledge and an interesting network. At present we are a team of 35 people with offices in Denmark, Belgrade, London and the USA. We aim to triple the number of employees within the next two years to meet the growing demand, especially in the US and the UK,” explains Andreas Jürgensen, CEO and co-founder of Passendo.

If you want to find out more about Passendo, read our interview with the founders here.

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InQvation has invested millions of Danish kronor into the Copenhagen-based AdTech startup Passendo, however, the exact amount has not been disclosed. The investment came after a six-long discussion between the startup and the investors, where they discussed the startup’s desire to expand outside of Scandinavia.

“We see a tremendously strong team with many years of experience and knowledge of their field. They know their customers 100 percent and they know what their customers’ needs and how they can help [meet those needs]”, says Claus Zibrandtsen, CEO of InQvation.

InQvation was founded by Zibrandtsen family in Denmark, and the organisation invests into companies with big growth potential. Following the investment, Claus Zibrandtsen now also joined Passendo’s board and he will help in developing strategic plans on international expansion.

“Our ambition is to achieve the same success in Europe within a number of years as we have had in Scandinavia. If that happens, then I would say we have done a good job. However, the focus should continue being on the needs of our customers, so it is important that we constantly develop the strongest technology and the best concepts. That’s what our success is based on”, says Andreas Jürgensen, CEO and co-founder of Passendo.

Read more about Passendo and their work in this Øresund Startup News interview.

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Welcome, Anders and Andreas! We are glad to have you here at Øresund Startup News. Tell us briefly about the startup you have founded.
Thank you for having us! To best explain what we do, let me first explain how much the technology behind online advertising developed in the last decade. When you are looking at a website, while you are waiting for the page – and the ads – to load, a live auction is held, for one and every ad placement. In this action hundreds of companies can use the data they have to create a bid strategy and bid, and the highest bidder wins the auction. This is all controlled by high tech algorithms and machine learning, and is very clever stuff. At Passendo we want to bring all this development into emails – the area that has been left behind in all this tech development!

What made you start the company? What kind of demand have you noticed?
We have seen tremendous development happening in the ad world, which is my background, and Anders has been working very seriously with email for many years. We started talking about this gap a few years ago, and soon the idea of starting Passendo was formed.

So who are your biggest clients?
In the Nordics we are working with most of the media houses, but I can mention Bonnier Publishing, Berlingske Group, and we have recently signed with a big American partner whom is onboarding more than 300 media organizations.

What makes Passendo different from other adtech companies? What are the main features of Passendo?
Today our clients can manage the advertising space in all their newsletters from one place. Once we started helping them commercialize their newsletters too, business really took off!

We have heard that Passendo is expanding further. Which regions or countries will Passendo enter in the nearest future?
We have an office in Dubai, are traveling to Germany ten times per year, and our first US partnership just happened, so we are quite excited these days!

How do you see the development of your company in the next 5 years?
We are working so hard to internationalize our concept these days, so I really hope to see us succeed internationally. I hope we can manage the growth in just the right way, while also building a company where a bunch of people can have a blast working every day.

What is your biggest challenge right now?
It’s always a challenge to hire the right people, and, as we are in many markets, we are also hiring people from different cultures, that’s always fun and sometimes a challenge. On the business front we are working with very large organizations, and they do not always move as fast as we could wish for, but we are learning to work around that now!

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