Originally published on Business Insider.

Newark, NJ, December 3, 2019: Audience Town, a vertical advertising platform for real estate companies, today announced a first-round of funding led by MathCapital with participation from multiple angel investors. With the investment comes a commercial partnership with global data management and advertising technology platform, MediaMath, providing Audience Town with world-class software and analytics resources required to build a platform for such an expensive product category.

Annual real estate advertising totals $30 billion making it the 3rd largest advertising category in the US, but remains unaddressed by the innovation in marketing and advertising technology. This new round of funding will accelerate the data and software to improve real estate advertising performance and execution across mobile, video, desktop, TV, outdoor, and the billions of devices consumers use to stay connected.

Top builders, brokerages, and commercial property owners are already working with Audience Town to qualify people early in the search process and engage them to become clients.

Lindsay Listanski, the Senior Director of National Marketing at Realogy (NYSE: RLGY) has worked with the major advertising platforms while at Coldwell Banker, Realogy and Climb. “I’ve been a long-time advocate for using data for targeted advertising but haven’t really seen a company able to turn that into reality like Audience Town can. I’m excited for a fellow New Jersey company to help our industry leap forward.”

“We are bringing decades of experience in data-driven advertising to the $47 trillion US real estate market,” said Ed Carey, Founder & CEO of Audience Town. “With this funding, access to MediaMath’s technology platform, and the onboarding of two new executives, we can create a platform specialized for residential and commercial builders, brokerages, property owners, iBuyers, and the entire ecosystem at a much more sophisticated and broader scale.”

“We have known this founding team for over a decade and admire how they have applied a vertical approach to data, tech and content to a massive industry and category like real estate.” says Eric Franchi, Operating Partner at MathCapital. “We are also excited to support a Newark, NJ-based startup.”

Anthony Greco, COO of Audience Town, added, “Given our early revenue traction and product market fit, we were able to attract sophisticated and experienced investors for our first round of funding. These investors believe in our vision and team.”

In addition to the recent funding news, two new founding executives have joined Audience Town to accelerate product and revenue. John Peragine has joined as Chief Revenue Officer from The Rubicon Project, where he most recently led global video from pre-revenue to a nine-figure business. Greg Cappello has joined as Chief Product Officer overseeing data, technology, and commercialization of the platform. Greg joined from leading mobile tech firm Kargo where he held the SVP, Marketing role. Prior to Kargo, Greg led ad product for Undertone through its most important growth period and acquisition by a publicly traded firm.

 

Industry Support of Audience Town

Chris Drayer, CEO and Co-Founder of real estate data company Revaluate says, “Our artificial intelligence is able to predict who is going to move in the next six months. I am excited to partner with Audience Town because they understand how marketing teams can leverage our predictive data about home movers in new ways. We see it as a great channel into the advertising markets.”

Ryan Clune, Director of Digital Marketing at K. Hovnanian Homes (NYSE: HOV), a top 20 national builder, says “We do a lot of research about who buys our new construction communities and Audience Town is able to find those specific audiences online using a unique blend of offline and online data.”

As Head of Ad Sales for McClatchy, a leader in local media with 30 newspapers across the country, Nick Johnson wants his real estate advertising clients to get more from the web using Audience Town. “Real estate is ultimately a local business and our advertisers want a way to target home buyers and sellers that marries content, data and tech in new ways. Audience Town gives McClatchy advertisers a better way to target people likely-to-move.”

 

About Audience Town

Audience Town launched in 2018 to offer smarter ways for the real estate industry to advertise online. Clients include residential and commercial real estate companies as well as home-related marketers.

Audience Town is headquartered in Newark, NJ. Learn more at www.audiencetown.com.

 

About MathCapital

MathCapital is an early-stage venture capital fund focused on the transformation of marketing and media.