Early Canva, Car Next Door venture capital investor Investible leads $2.9m cap raise for Aussie adtech firm TRENDii

News 26 Sep 2022 - 3 min read

Early Canva, Car Next Door venture capital investor Investible leads $2.9m cap raise for Aussie adtech firm TRENDii

By Sam Buckingham-Jones - Deputy Editor

Trendii's Aaron Woolf (above): "We believe good advertising should be done in a way that is non-intrusive and respects the consumer, whilst also delivering massive scale for brands and high revenues for publishers."

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TRENDii, led by CEO and founder Aaron Woolf, scans images and video content and places fashion and homeware ads alongside. It has banked $2.9 million in a seed round capital raise led by early Canva and Car Next Door investor Investible and plans to invest heavily in its content, team – and in an international expansion.

What you need to know:

TRENDii has raised $2.9m in a seed round, led by Investible – an early stage Canva investor – and an unnamed media partner.
The capital raise will fund more people, tech, and an international expansion, CEO and founder Aaron Woolf says.

Australian contextual commerce adtech company TRENDii has scored $2.9 million in a seed round capital raise, led by early-stage Canva, Ipsy and Car Next Door venture capital investment firm Investible and an unnamed media partner.

The two-year-old start-up, which works with Daily Mail, Are Media, News Corp and PopSugar, uses Artificial Intelligence technology to scan images and videos and place ads for visually similar products alongside the content.

The funding will give CEO and founder Aaron Woolf capital to improve the product, invest in new technologies, build more product categories, hire more people and expand into international markets, the company said in a release.

Jayden Basha, Investible’s Investment Manager, said the firm had “followed Aaron’s journey since 2018 and have been consistently impressed by his ability to translate a vision into a groundbreaking business.

“When the TRENDii platform evolved from a standalone D2C app into a B2B contextual advertising platform, the company’s potential skyrocketed,” Basha said.

“TRENDii is a frontrunner in new advertising technology, empowering brands and revolutionising contextual commerce.”

TRENDii’s model of contextually advertising fashion and homeware products in online content doesn’t appear to have been impacted by the delay of the end of third-party cookies in Google’s Chrome browser.

“We believe good advertising should be done in a way that is non-intrusive and respects the consumer, whilst also delivering massive scale for brands and high revenues for publishers. Contextual commerce has been hard to achieve at scale, but TRENDii delivers an industry first: automated product targeted to specific content,” Woolf said.

“This gives consumers a better and richer content experience; brands new, high-value customers; and publishers strong, sustainable revenues.”