• Aggero, a marketing technology platform that provides partnership, monetization, and measurement systems to brands and creators in the e-sports, gaming and livestreaming markets, has announced raising a $2M seed round.
• The startup will use the funds to develop its platform technologies with a focus on machine learning models, media measurement, data intelligence, monetization, and metaverse applications.
• The investment was led by LAUNCHub Ventures, an early-stage VC fund focused on Central and Southeastern Europe. It was joined by GapMinder, SCM Advisors, as well as angel investors Klaas Kersting and Phil Mohr. The new round brought Aggero’s total funding to $3.3 million.
Forecasts indicate that the global livestreaming market will grow by $25 billion, at a CAGR of 13.5%, between 2022-2026, driven by the rising penetration of smartphones and easy access to the Internet.
The current shifts in how we control and experience the Internet through Web 3.0 and the metaverse, respectively, are further moving our professional and social lives online, creating more opportunities for the livestreaming market.
“The traditional divides between digital and social media, influencer, paid media, and livestream marketing have broken down with the advent of the new Creator Economy paradigm. Brands and individuals have become content creators in an ecosystem that blends fandom, entertainment, advertising, and revenue.
By unifying partnership management, monetization systems, and measurement, while setting a future path to design applications with a focus on Metaverse applications, Aggero will be a comprehensive strategic platform for the evolving Web3 marketing landscape,” says Cristian Manea, Aggero CEO and Founder.
For LAUNCHub Ventures, this is the third investment this year. They previously participated in the $3.4M round of Tenyks, an MLOps tools platform with Bulgarian DNA that helps ML engineers build better and safer AI, and in the €7.2M Series A of Slovenian healthcare app Mediately, which makes drug information accessible to doctors. It also follows LAUNCHub’s closing of a new fund of over €74M, dedicated to supporting SEE and CEE founders at seed and Series A stages.
“We try to find and invest in world class founders with global ambitions like Cristian. The platform that he is building is in a vertical where most of the young generation spend their time and energy. We believe that great companies are going to be built there and Aggero is going to be one of those,” Todor Breshkov, Co-founder and Managing Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures shares.
Innovating e-sports and gaming livestreaming marketing with AI-driven data analytics
Aggero has its headquarters in London, UK, while most of the team is based in the US and Romania. The startup was co-founded in 2018 by Cristian Manea (CEO) and Roger Lopez (COO). Tech entrepreneur and investor Cristian Manea brings experience in sales, marketing, strategic partnerships, and management in e-sports, gaming, and blockchain, while Roger Lopez is a seasoned senior marketing executive.
Their goal with Aggero is to organize an unorganized market, where there are plenty of opportunities for brands to improve and maximize their return on investment. To that end, the platform assists sponsors, advertisers, and content creators in the e-sports, gaming, and livestreaming space by adding data intelligence to partnership management and offering AI-driven data analytics to measure ROI and optimize media.
The Aggero Platform consists of three foundational technologies. First, through Partnership Discovery, marketers can gain insights into potential sponsorship partners and get a single view of multi-channel stream performance and category trend data.
In the Media Marketplace app, brands and creators can connect, negotiate, and launch digital and livestream integrated campaigns with automated media serving through a platform-based exchange.
Finally, through StreamScan Analytics, users can monitor and measure the brand impact of voice mentions from streamers, a first in the media analytics industry, as well as track the visual placements of brand logos and creative assets during broadcasts.
With the new funds, Aggero will expand its team of software engineers and data scientists, to support new development initiatives such as increasing the platform coverage, enhancing platform UI and UX, and optimizing machine learning models. The funding will also fuel the development of alpha-stage projects related to AI integrations, creator monetization tools, and metaverse applications.
