Pressboard Media, a private Vancouver company that promotes sponsored content ads, has announced it has raised $2 million in a funding round led by the Vancouver Founder Fund (VFF), a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage companies, with the participation of existing investors.
“It’s a rare occasion where we need to actively convince a company to take our capital,” Fraser Hall, a partner at VFF.
“Pressboard is our kind of mystical animal; high growth, profitable with an obsession for delivering remarkable value to both brands and publishers”
Pressboard promotes its clients through sponsored content on various media websites like Vox Media and Mashable.
The company has offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and New York and hopes to use the funds to expand its partnership and marketing teams in their offices. It is also developing a tool called Pressbot, which is intended to help companies predict how well the sponsored content will do on the publisher’s site before it is published . It is meant to help check the quality of the story being published by looking at a variety of characteristics including headline, topic, and readability. Pressboard said it will also analyze social channels to see which mediums the story will perform best on.
“Our mission is simple, help companies tell stories that people love to read, watch and share,” said Jerrid Grimm, co-founder and CEO of Pressboard.
“Our marketplace gives brands access to hundreds of media publishers with incredible expertise to assist in co-creating those stories. We then layer on our technology to predict, and even guarantee, the performance of each of those stories.”
