Goldman Sachs invests $325 million in ISpot.tv Inc

Goldman Sachs Asset Management LP has invested $325 million in ISpot.tv Inc. The company helps to verify the impact and reach of its advertisers' streaming-video and TV ads.

ISpot, based in Bellevue, Washington, has built a software that automatically catalogs metadata and recognizes content that helps gather information on when a commercial break starts, which one is playing, and its playing for how long in real-time.

After this process, it helps the advertisers understand what this data means for their business. It also helps them know whether the consumers who consumed the ads visited their website or brought any products.


ISpot had raised $58 million in total, and its latest round in 2018 valued the 10-year-old company at $330 million. The company employs just about 350 people and generated a revenue of $75 million last year. The revenue in 2020 was $51 million.

The company wants to expand its services and use the newly raised funding for this purpose. It will do so by potentially undertaking acquisitions.

It also wants to add sales, product development, and engineering employees. Ispot has acquired ad-measurement companies such as Ace Metrix Inc., Tunity Inc, and DRMetric LLC.

Chief Executive Sean Muller stated that the acquisitions have been excellent for the company, and these will not be the last ones.

Traditional TV consumers are slowly migrating toward streaming platforms, and ad measurement has become increasingly important. In this changing environment, the traditional companies in the media sector are looking to improve their marketing tools to analyze data of their media buys.

Nielson has dominated the ratings on TV for many decades and is facing troubles. NBC Universal stated that ISpot would help them build a new framework for measurement, which would help in verifying programming and ads on streaming video and traditional TV.

Earlier in April, EDO Inc, a measurement, analytics, and data software company, received an investment of $80 million from Shamrock Capital.

Innvoid Corp is a company in ad tech and brought TVSquared Ltd. in February. TVSquared has its focuses on television streaming.