Ad Fontes raises $4.2 million Series A

Ad Fontes Media, which rates news for advertisers based on bias and quality, raised a $4.2 million Series A funding round led by Aion Ventures and joined by New Community Transformation Fund–Denver (NCTF-D) and several other industry and mission-aligned investors, including ad tech entrepreneur Will Luttrell. 

The latest funding round brings the company’s total funding to slightly over $6 million since it was founded in 2018.

Ad Fontes intends to use its newly acquired funds to expand its media rating tools for foreign-language content, including expanding its current Spanish language capabilities, as well as to hire researchers who specialize in media bias.

“We are at a pivotal point in our history where we have reached extreme levels of polarization, which has led to significant internal and external conflict. At the root of the problem is the advertising ecosystem which has been stripping quality information providers, while funding misinformation,” said Troy Root, Managing Partner of Aion Ventures. 

“Ad Fontes has created a superior methodology and dataset to be implemented into the AdTech ecosystem to help reverse this cycle. We are likely headed into one of the most contentious elections in our nation’s history and we need to reunite to establish a state of equilibrium. Democracy depends on a healthy media ecosystem and I fear if we don’t act decisively now, the consequences could be large. By providing a framework for the public to navigate online media bias and assess reliability, we empower the people to challenge the divisive incentive structures that the advertising ecosystem has created over the past two decades.”

According to Ad Fontes Media founder and CEO Vanessa Otero, “The value of our latest funding round will soon become vividly apparent to our clients and advertisers, as we roll out enhancements to our most popular existing solutions such as Spanish language ratings. We will soon introduce new ones as well, including tools for brands to utilize our bias and reliability ratings on platforms like YouTube and Twitter.”

Ad Fontes intends to enter new geos, starting with Brazil and India, both of which have significant news markets. According to Otero, misinformation is a major issue in Brazil in particular. Otero said Ad Fontes will also start utilizing AI modeling to scale its capacity to grade media quality across a greater variety of online material.

“Americans have never been more interested in news than they are today,”  Dr. Brad Berens in the role of Head of Insights said. “Journalism doesn’t have an audience problem: it has a revenue problem in part because advertisers worry that the news isn’t brand safe or brand suitable. Those worries are unfounded. High-quality, low-bias news is both safe and suitable for brands. Plus, advertising within the news is beneficial for any advertiser’s reputation. This was a key finding in the IAB ‘News Trust Halo’ study I led in 2020. What we’re seeing at Ad Fontes Media today is that the most-desirable consumers read and watch high-quality, low-bias news. Advertising in the news isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also the smart and impactful thing to do.”