Durham startup Kevel buys Portuguese audience segmentation company, continues to hire
DURHAM – Kevel, the Durham-headquartered API infrastructure platform that enables companies to build customized advertising platforms, has bought a Portuguese firm, Velocidi.
In addition to the company’s technology and assets, Kevel will add all of the firm’s full-time employees to the company.
The acquisition will expand the product offerings, according to a company statement.
“Together with Velocidi, Kevel takes a step forward in its mission of keeping the Internet open and free. It’s important to us that every company has the tools to drive new revenue and take back the internet from the digital monopolies,” said James Avery, the founder and CEO of Kevel, in a statement. “By marrying together Kevel’s ad serving platform with Velocidi’s audience tools, we’ve made it even easier to build a new, high-margin revenue stream that doesn’t compromise on the user experience or security.”
The acquisition will “enable Kevel to enhance user segmentation and content personalization in a targeted, privacy-first way through Velocidi’s advanced machine learning audience tools,” the company statement reads.
“Velocidi’s dedication to privacy-first audience segmentation aligns well with Kevel’s vision of privacy-first digital monetization. We’re thrilled to partner with them to offer more functionality to both our customers and theirs,” said Paulo Cunha, CEO of Velocidi, in the statement issued by Kevel. “By enabling more functionality for advertisers to target their customers, publishers have the opportunity to build ad platforms that can compete with ones from Amazon, Walmart, and eBay.”
Still Growing
Kevel rebranded in December 2020 and raised $11 million at the time. The company was formerly known as Adzerk, and a spokesperson for the company told WRAL TechWire that the company now employs more than 110 full-time workers.
A year later, in December 2021, the company announced it had raised a Series B round of $10 million and planned to add additional employees during 2022.
Now, the company has made the acquisition. The company continues to hire for remote positions, according to its website, and was named among the best places to work by Inc.com earlier this year, as it had been the prior year.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.