Symbiosys, a two-year-old advertising tech startup that is rethinking how retailers and product brands work together, raised a $9 million Series A round led by Seattle-area venture capital firm Fuse.
The company is hoping to ride tailwinds from a growing $45 billion retail media market that is generating substantial advertising revenue for retailers, driven in part by the success of Amazon’s high-margin ad business.
Symbiosys is focused on helping retailers sell off-site advertising promoting products from brands — ads that show up in places such as Google search or Instagram.
The idea is to better align performance marketing efforts between the two sides — giving brands a better way to drive traffic to retailer sites by leveraging first-party measurement data, and to help retailers scale their retail media networks.
Symbiosys offers real-time reporting and analytics. It also has unique collaborative bidding technology that lets retailers and brands bid with one another to pay for off-site product ad campaigns.
The company’s customers include various large retailers, said CEO and founder Bashar Kachachi, a former advertising leader at Google who also spent more than a decade at Microsoft, where he worked on ad-related products.
“We’re doing something very novel,” Kachachi said.
Other execs at Symbiosys include President John Roswech, the former chief revenue officer at Marchex and HookLogic; and engineering leader Dan Cooke, who was previously at Criteo, HookLogic, and WorldQuant.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company has more than 20 employees. Total funding to date is $11.5 million.
Other investors include HookLogic co-founder Jonathan Opdyke and Flywheel Digital co-founder Patrick Miller. Scott Friend, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, invested as an individual angel.
