Advertio raises €5 million in investment round
The investment round was led by the Portuguese Lince Capital and also included the participation of Portugal Ventures, Olisipo Way and Luís Baptista-Coelho.
Advertio was born in 2016 to help small businesses break even on the internet. The Portuguese platform helps micro and small businesses to place ads on Google and the social networks Facebook and Instagram. Six years later, the tech company has raised a €5 million investment round. The capital injection will serve to recruit 50 more workers by the end of 2023 and change its name: it will be called Leadzai.
The investment round was led by the Portuguese Lince Capital and also included Portugal Ventures, Olisipo Way and Luís Baptista-Coelho.
“Leadzai has strong potential in terms of both its product, which is under constant development and its management team,” says Tomás Lavin Peixe, partner at Lince Capital.
“If all goes well, the goal of the investment is to double the team”: 15 people will be hired by the end of this year; the remaining 35 will arrive throughout 2023, details the founder and leader of the Portuguese technology, João de Sousa Aroso.
Leadzai’s founder assumes that the recruitment perspective is conservative and may be revised: “due to what is happening in the market, we don’t know very well what’s coming. We have to be restrained in our ambitions”.
Rebranding and greater international focus
When it was born as Advertio, in 2016, Leadzai’s purpose was to “create campaigns”, hence the name compacting the words ‘advertisement’ and ‘io’, for data input/output. Now, the company is focused on “generating leads”.
The platform’s mission is to help grow 200 million businesses globally. By year’s end, the international market will generate around 80% of Leadzai’s revenues. Besides Europe, the technology company operates throughout Latin America – except in Brazil and Venezuela – thanks to a strategic partnership with a company from Argentina.
The next move will be the US market, where the first person has already been hired. “It’s a market with giant potential.”
Out of the horizons, for now, is the Asian market. “ When that becomes necessary, we will need a strategic partner. It is very different to teach a system to work in Latin and Western languages than in Asian languages. We have a lot to learn in the area of artificial intelligence – the effort would be so great that it is not yet a priority.”
