Ad Lightning is on a roll.
The Seattle startup was just named to the inaugural class of Verizon Ventures’ new “Media Tech Venture Studio,” which accepted eight startups that will receive a $100,000 investment and spend three months working out of a co-working space in New York City.
Verizon and its corporate venture capital arm are partnering with R/GA to help run the new accelerator, which provides office space, mentorship, networking connections, access to Verizon’s digital media businesses, and more.
Founded last year and spun out of Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, Ad Lightning helps publishers and advertising exchange platforms monitor bad ads that slow down sites and disrupt engagement.
Ad Lightning, which raised $1 million last month, will remain in Seattle, with a few employees going back-and-forth to New York City for the accelerator.
Scott Moore, the company’s CEO, told GeekWire that the $100,000 investment is actually from R/GA Ventures, which is co-owned by Verizon and R/GA and will have the right to invest in future rounds on a pro-rata basis.
“The biggest benefits for Ad Lighting are the opportunity to do business development with Verizon media properties like AOL and Yahoo (and many others) as well as collaboration on mobile and video ad collection and evaluation,” said Moore, who co-founded Ad Lightning with Kate Reinmiller and Drake Callahan. “Verizon’s wireless capability has the potential to be a major accelerant to our scanning and ad collection process.”
Ad Lightning is also gearing up to raise a Series A investment later this year. This past November, the 11-person company reeled in a $2 million seed round led by Sinclair Digital Ventures, an investment division of Sinclair Broadcast Group.
The other companies in Verizon’s accelerator include (descriptions from Verizon):
- cognitiveVR enables brands, marketers and researchers to extract valuable insights from virtual and augmented reality experiences
- GankStars is a top ranked, mobile-first, multi-platform competitive esports organization
- Imposium automatically puts data into videos to make them feel like they were personally made for each user
- ScoreStream is a crowdsourcing platform for local sports content
- Streamroot enables content providers to increase the quality of online video while drastically improving the economics of OTT delivery
- Transmit.Live is a media technology platform that simplifies live stream distribution and promotion with unified measurement to expand viewership
- Vidrovr automatically analyzes companies’ large video collections to make content inside the videos discoverable.
