Coull sets sights on becoming Bristol’s billion dollar baby

New funding, regional hires, revenue growth and US expansion for tech start-up

London(21 Mar 2014)

Coull, the video monetisation platform for digital publishers, has announced its intention to become Bristol’s first billion dollar tech business following a year of high growth. Coull has spent the last two years building one of the largest video ad networks in the world. Its Vidlinkr technology now has access to close to 1bn video plays per month on premium publisher sites, across 180+ markets. The business has grown revenue an unprecedented 500 per cent in the last six months and has seen staff numbers increase by 90 per cent since January 2013.

CEO, Irfon Watkins, commented on the growth: “We set really aggressive sales and growth targets for the last two quarters. This growth shows that publishers are starting to realise the clear benefits showing more contextually relevant video advertising can have on their bottom line, so it’s a huge testament to our sales and marketing teams for achieving this.” 

To help drive its future expansion, Coull recently received US$4million in funding from angel investors, meaning it has received $12.2million in total funding to date. The new round of funding will help open a new office in New York to sit alongside its current Bristol, London and Santa Barbara offices. Despite only launching in the US market under a year ago, Coull already sees 60 per cent of its business come from stateside. 

Coull has also announced two new hires; Ben Humphry as Head of Demand for Europe and Michelle Melisaratos as Global Head of Programmatic AdOps. Ben has served in various senior roles across the digital media, with both media owners, and technology vendors across Europe, including many years leading International Sales Operations at MSN, he’s also served on the board of IAB Europe. Michelle has extensive expertise in programmatic adops, having worked for major media agency groups in campaign management, as well as building and leading the Xaxis AdOps function, and more recently holding the role of Director of Program Management internationally at Yahoo. Michelle will head up Coull’s global AdOps function from their New York office.

Coull is bucking the trend by not seeking investment through VCs, Steve Brown, co-founder and former CEO of Buy.at, and one of Coull’s angel investors, explained the appeal of the business: 

“Within the UK start-up scene many entrepreneurs, especially those receiving early capital, are led to be too focused on a quick exit at reasonable multiples for the initial investors, rather than building a long-term business. This can have detrimental effects on the maximum opportunity of a business being realised. I admire Irfon for having positioned Coull with the potential to be a billion dollar tech business and it is fantastic he is committed to building it to just that.”