Picnic raises $1.25 million for its user-first ad marketplace

London-based media platform Picnic has raised an additional $1.25 million in funding to supplement its $3 million Series A round, which was closed in December 2021, AdExchanger reported. 

Founded in 2017, Picnic delivers ad formats inspired by the high quality experiences of social with user-first inventory to let advertisers drive attention and ROI. 

“We were very much focused on intuitive and non-intrusive social display formats and user-friendly mobile web pages, specifically fast-loading Google AMP pages, and those are still key tenants of our proposition,” CEO Matthew Goldhill. “So we’ve doubled down on this idea of user-first as a mission, and have continued to build products around that.”

This latest round was led by UK-based VC firm FirstPartyCapital. Gurman Hundal, global executive chairman and co-founder of marketing intelligence company MiQ, and Brian O’Kelley, co-founder and CEO of sustainable ad tech startup Scope3 and former CEO of AppNexus, also participated in the round. 

Back in November, Picnic announced that a single ad impression delivered across their marketplace generates just 0.49g of CO2e on average as measured by Scope3, 50% lower than a current industry estimate. “This is a result of Picnic’s unique inventory which must pass a user experience algorithm based on Google Core Web Vital data – ensuring page stability and fast load speeds due to reduced supply chain complexity,” said Picnic. 

“Sustainability is fundamentally about making each ad experience count, and that’s built into the way Picnic does business,” Scope3’s O’Kelley said. “I look forward to supporting Picnic’s mission of prioritizing the user and delivering better, more sustainable outcomes for advertisers and publishers.”