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Site Tour snares fresh funds from Auctus Capital
- Published March 25, 2015 10:01AM UTC
- Publisher Wholesale Investor
- Categories Company Updates
Source: Australian Financial Review by Carrie LaFrenz, March 18th 2015
Site Tour, a buying and selling platform for outdoor advertising, has secured fresh funding from a group of young venture capitalists helping Australian start-ups reach commercialisation.
Auctus Capital declined to reveal the sum of its first investment in Site Tour, but it too is a start-up of sorts, founded last year by seven partners who work in investment banking and strategy at a number of organisations incuding BCG, Google, eBay, Macquarie, Magellan Funds Mangement, and Intuit. The average age of Auctus partners is 30 years old.
Site Tour is targeting Australia’s more than $600 million out-of-home (OOH) advertising industry through its platform that allows buyers to search over 100,000 outdoor billboards across Australia and select locations within seconds by using Google Maps and location-based data. The OOH ad industry grew 10 per cent in 2014.
Amron D’Silva, who works as an investment analyst at Magellan Asset Management in New York as his day job and is a partner at Auctus, said the group was attracted to the niche industry, the credibility of founder Michael Scruby and the scale to grow the business globally.
“Out-of-home is the fastest growing traditional media channel in the Australian advertising industry and it continues to gain market share as a percentage of total advertising expenditure, in particular in Australia,” he said.
“This growth is expected to continue given the high ROI [return on investment] on this type of advertising. We were also keen to gain exposure to the programmatic advertising trend which continues to gain traction globally.”
Site Tour was founded by former Eye Corp sales head Michael Scruby in 2011, and today counts some of the biggest media buyers as his clients including Omnicom, Mediabrands, GroupM and Ikon.
Former Telstra executive and CEO of Hills Holdings, Ted Pretty, was an early backer of Site Tour, along with managing director of CMB Capital, Jamie Olsen.
The company has already raised more than $1 million and the latest cash injection will allow it to further develop its software and grow the company.
Mr D’Silva said while Site Tour is a “fairly mature and progressed business opportunity”, Auctus is open to an investment at the pre-revenue stage, if an investment ticks the box for a number of other hurdles.
“In our discussions with a number of start-ups to date, we have identified revenue generation as a significant barrier for funding and hence believe our approach represents a key point of differentiation between ourselves and a number of other angel investors or VCs,” he said. “We also do not consider any sectors to be ‘off-limits’ for investment which we understand has also been a restraint on funding for some entrepreneurs.”
Since closing the Site Tour investment, Auctus has had discussions with start-ups across the healthcare, tech, biomed, travel, retail and fintech industries.
“We have really immersed ourselves in the start-up scene, and three of our partners are also involved in start-ups or blogs themselves being TheTechPulse, a website which gives further details on the latest Australian startups, EdenExchange, a business which is essentially an online exchange or marketplace for small-medium businesses and The Crimson Bride, an online business offering wedding inspiration and links to vendors servicing the growing south-east Asian wedding market,” Mr D’Silva said.
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