Adtech company SilverPush raises $5 M from Japan's FreakOut Holdings

San Francisco and Gurugram-based SilverPush has raised $5 million in Series B from Japan’s marketing company FreakOut Holdings.

SilverPush plans to use the funds to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and explore the over-the-top (OTT) players in the Asia-Pacific region - namely Hong Kong, Australia and South Korea.

Hitesh Chawla, CEO of SilverPush said: “The core technology of our product is using AI for detecting content in a video such as a logo, face, etc. There are hundreds of use cases, for instance, if someone is drinking coffee in a video, we can show cafe ads.”

The advertising-technology company provides cross-device mapping solutions to big brands and helps them understand user behaviour. SilverPush does this by mapping data points generated by multiple devices into a unique mapping ID, said media reports.

The company was founded by Hitesh Chawla, Mudit Seth and Alex Modon in 2012. SilverPush had last raised $1.2 million from Singapore-headquartered venture capital firm M&S Partners in September 2015.

So far, the company has raised six rounds of funding worth $7.8 million. 500 Startups and IDG Ventures India have also previously invested in SilverPush. The company has worked with the likes of Tiger Beer, KFC, Coca-Cola, Samsung and Johnson & Johnson.

Last November, SilverPush had launched an AI-driven recommendation engine called Mirrors. Mirrors uses AI, coupled with computer vision, to detect the context in a video and subsequently provides in-video advertisements.

Mirrors picks context from a video content using Face detection - celebrity brand endorsement; Logo detection - to raise brand awareness and increase traction; Emotion - allows driving promotion using the in-video emotion; and Object - to serve contextually rich advertisements.

Some of its other products include Prism, Parallels, DSP, Hexa and Javelin.

According to media reports, Hitesh said, “We are growing 2x annually, and we expect to double our revenues in FY-20.”