Glispa bought the Russian mediator MoneyTap
The German advertising company Glispa announced the acquisition of the Russian mediation platform MoneyTap. The startup is being relaunched under a new name — Ampiri, and the office will move from Russia to Berlin. According to the CEO of the former MoneyTap, the project will remain “fairly autonomous.”
Glispa bought the startup as part of an expansion strategy. The ultimate goal of the company is to become a full—service service for the promotion of games and mobile applications. To do this, the German company acquired MoneyTap, an advertising mediation platform that allows developers to maximize the effect and revenue from advertising.
The platform works like this: the built-in MoneyTap SDK opens access to advertising offers from various advertising networks around the world. At the same time, it is determined at what point and in which grid there are the most profitable advertising offers. As a result, the developer receives the most profitable ad blocks.
We contacted Kirill Tyufanov, the CEO of the purchased service, and asked him to comment on the transaction.
Kirill TyufanovWhy did Glispa decide to rename the platform to Ampiri?
It was a general decision, we didn’t have a strong attachment to the Moneytap name, because it was originally a working name. It’s hard to judge the quality of the name when you’re not a native speaker, so we didn’t rush to change the name much before. Now there is a strong team of copywriters and marketers that you can trust.
What does the deal give directly to the startup?
We join the Glisp. The startup will no longer be a separate business, although it remains a fairly autonomous project. In general, everything happened very organically, because our product development goals coincided 100%. We dreamed of creating an independent solution to make the mobile advertising market more transparent and honest, so that developers could protect their interests. Glispa has exactly the same goals and desires, so many existing mediation solutions with which they communicated on the subject of the transaction did not suit them. And they probably communicated with all existing ones. We didn’t even have to change the roadmap much, just add cool new things to it. “Cool things” means “intelligent” mediation, which we will be able to do thanks to integration with the DMP platform, analytical AI and other Big Data projects of Glisp.
The startup, as far as we know, grew on the basis of i-Free. How will you separate?
We’ve been separated for a long time. We used infrastructure divisions and outsourced business maintenance tasks. The product itself and the team have been working autonomously for a long time.
You also announced the relocation of the office to Berlin. It’s not entirely clear why. After all, staff crutches are very cheap in Russia now.
Well, everything is simple here, the expected value from accelerating all communications with other projects of the company due to the move turns out to be much higher than the additional costs that this move carries.
And the last question I can’t help but ask: for how much was the company acquired (at least an order of magnitude)?
Unfortunately, I have no right to comment on anything here. I can only say that in the summer they wanted to buy Unity, and then the price was lower, well, in general, our vision did not coincide. So everything [happened] that we are very happy about the current deal.
Thanks for the interview!
