How This Company is Riding the New Wave of Adtech In the past one year between FY 2017-18 the company has grown by 81.45 per cent in terms of revenue and 87.30 per cent in terms of profit

Aashish Shah and Hiren Shah started their entrepreneurial journey as teenagers. Their first venture was called Indiafreemail.com, which with the help of GPO brought down the mail delivery time from 30-45 days to almost a week. But the business model became redundant soon.

Yet, this didn't deter the Shah brothers' determination and almost a decade later Vertoz was born.

A programmatic company based in India, Vertoz offers engaging and innovative advertising and monetization solutions. Aashish Shah, CEO and cofounder, Vertoz says, "Back then, the advertisers struggled with unclear campaign reports, fixed price for the inventory, lack of targeting options etc. On the other hand, publishers too were swamped with problems. Thus, we decided to develop a programmatic platform - Ingenious Plex."

Initially, the startup's challenges were no different from other emerging technology-led businesses. "Ad-tech is driven by technology, which keeps evolving rapidly," he says, adding, "During our early days, when we were based solely in India, we had to depend upon other advanced countries for the infrastructure like servers and other machinery. But now, things have changed." He says the Indian market has been very traditional when it comes to digital ad spends.

"For us, it is a journey of making a paradigm shift in the way marketers look at digital advertising and focus on programmatic advertising, getting them to see these unique benefits and leverage them to reap substantially higher Return On Ad Spends," he explains. In the past three years, the company has registered a robust year-on-year average growth rate of 56 per cent. In fact, in the past one year — between FY 2017-18 — the company has grown by 81.45 per cent in terms of revenue and 87.30 per cent in terms of profit.

"We have our cost centre (a part of the company to which costs may be charged for accounting purposes) in India, where we are strategically optimising our operating costs. This has enabled us to manage our funds well and finance our future business prospects," Shah adds. Furthermore, the company is also focused on spreading its wings across different continents.

To top it all, it just didn't depend on the RTB model to make a mark for itself in the advertising industry. It clubbed the model with decision-making algorithms methods, in other words, it used artificial intelligence and machine learning to help the customer on a real-time basis.

"Technology is the core of our business and we have tried to adopt all the latest innovation in our operating model," he asserts. This is where the ad-tech firm gets its agility from and hence, now it is ready to experiment with the new-age technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality along with podcast and header bidding.