Moloco Inc., an AI-powered advertising solutions startup, is set to accelerate its global business with a new executive hire from The Walt Disney Company affiliate.
The Silicon Valley-based ad-tech firm, led by South Korean American Co-founder and CEO Ahn Ikk-jin, named former Disney+ Hotstar President Sunil Rayan as the new chief business officer in June.
Rayan is an online marketing expert. Prior to Disney+ Hotstar, he worked for more than seven years at Google and led its mobile app ads business and games. He joined Disney+ Hotstar in early 2020, the largest on-demand over-the-top (OTT) streaming service provider in India, and has expanded the business to eight times its size. He also worked for McKinsey & Co. and IBM. The new hire is understood as showing Moloco’s competitiveness in the global ad-tech market, industry sources say.
Before he co-founded Moloco in 2013, Ahn worked for ads technologies at YouTube and Google. He led the development of Moloco’s technology, which analyzes big data and provides clients with solutions to generate profits via online ads. The ad-tech startup rapidly grew up – it has secured more than 200 corporate clients and increased sales by around 100% year by year. The firm’s annual sales exceeded $100 million in 2021.
“Ahn has led the startup with his belief in the growth of the ad-tech market, where Google and Meta mostly dominate. Moloco will further stand out with its privacy and data protection as its business is using non-personally identifiable information, which doesn’t mix first-party data across advertisers,” a venture capital source said.
In August 2021, the startup
raised around $148 million in its Series C funding led by US-based VC firm Tiger Global Management and was valued at around 1.7 trillion won ($1.3 billion). In May of the same year, by raising $20 million from Korean PE fund Shinhan Smilegate Global Fund No. 1., it became the first Korean descent-owned firm
to be named a unicorn among Silicon Valley-based AI startups.
Moloco is attracting new talents by granting the firm’s restricted stock units (RSUs), which are equity incentives to employees. The RSU value is expected to jump if Moloco lists on the Nasdaq in 2023 as planned. The firm woos engineers with benefits such as supporting up to 2.5 million won for staff’s self-improvement per year and flexible work hours. These also make Moloco one of the most popular tech startups among young job seekers in Korea, alongside Dunamu Inc., the operator of Korea’s top crypto exchange Upbit, and Sendbird Inc., a fast-growing in-app chat and messaging service provider.
Write to Jeong-Soo Hwang at
hjs@hankyung.comJihyun Kim edited this article.
