smartly

Almost every company wants to take their business online, and if they aren’t, it is because they already are online! In a heavily digitized world, a business can stay relevant only if it can attract people online. Doing so is becoming more and more difficult due to the sheer volume of competitors online. Social media marketing is a sure-fire marketing method used by most modern companies nowadays. Let us take a look at a company smartly that made full use of this to propel itself forward. 

About the Founder

Ovaska grew up in Helsinki, studying Economics and Finance with Statistics and Mathematics on the side. He began his career as a researcher working on how Russian’s economy impacted Finland’s economic growth. He soon got restless and left to start Aaltoes.com at his university in 2008. That company became a leading university-level startup association for entrepreneurs.

It was through this initiative that he met his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki. When Tuomo’s startup ran out of funding, the duo got together to build a company. They began with FunRank before moving on to Metrify and finally settled on Smartly.io.

Past Efforts

Prior to Smartly.io, Kristo Ovaska and his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki, started Metrify, which made value predictions for gaming companies. The company began in 2012, a year that marked the beginning of the big data analytics bubble. Around that time, most gaming companies acquired customers using outdated methods and hence was not visible.

Metrify used their analytics to predict where to invest their acquisition money. Around this time, Facebook went public and so needed to make money. Facebook knew that mobile-gaming companies had the money they needed and would be good buyers. They also had the data that such companies needed, and so the gaming companies moved to Facebook.

Early Struggles

Slowly these gaming companies began to pump in money, and their advertising helped attract people to Facebook’s News Feed. This huge shift into social media advertising became Smartly’s stepping stone into the industry. The duo opened in Germany, coding and rapidly scaling their features. The company began as an eight-member team partnering with Rocket Internet. The company scaled rapidly and doubled its size every month for the next ones.

In six months, the company became profitable going international thanks to Rocket Internet. Facebook trusted the small team from Helsinki so much that they recommended them to several big customers abroad! So much so that they now have customers such as Ubisoft, Uber, and eBay, helping manage over $1.8 billion in ads.

Growth and Future Plans

The company doubled its headcount from 150 to 400 within a span of 18 months. Similarly, they expanded their office chain from seven to seventeen. The rise of Facebook Stories has also helped the company improve its visibility and reach. The company raised €100,000 in 2013, following it up with another €1 million a year later.

The company became profitable in 2015 and raised an additional €20 million, two years before. Almost 25 percent of Smartly.io is in the hands of the employees themselves. Recently, Smartly.io, raised $20 million through secondary funding thanks to Highland Europe. The company recently announced hitting a $1 billion run rate with over 500 happy customers.

 With a headquarters in Helsinki, the startup has a very Nordic working culture, which celebrates communication and freedom. The workforce hierarchy is very flat and straightforward regardless of position and seniority. Currently, the company has employees in several cities from around the world like New York, Helsinki, Dubai, and Sydney.

The team plans on expanding their creative side by offering the tools to ad teams. They have launched in alpha phase with Pinterest recently. They are also in talks with the likes of Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube.