Today I am thrilled to announce that Ad-Shield has raised $2M in Pre-Series A funding led by Shorooq partners, alongside our existing investors, Bass Investment and Hashed, as well as key industry angels. This funding will help us accelerate the adoption of our next-gen adblock recovery solution globally and expand our operations in the US.

First and foremost, I am super proud of our team. I thank them for the perseverance, talent, and devotion to build and service this new technology. We would not be here without them. We are a small but mighty team and believe that we can move mountains with these members.

I’d like to take a moment to briefly explain what we’re working on. 

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What’s wrong?

Simply put, there is something broken about the digital ad ecosystem now. Globally, it’s estimated that 30-40% of internet users are using some type of tools to block / remove ads online, either willingly or unwillingly. For some websites, this figure goes up to 60-70%. And the number of adblock users is only growing. 

With $700bn+ digital ad spending in 2024, it is no doubt that adblocking has a massive impact on the market. It may not look so intuitive but all participants of the digital ad ecosystem are getting hurt by adblockers (more on the vicious cycle here). It is a critical problem for not only publisher but also for the advertisers and consumers / website visitors, and there have not been a viable, sustainable solution as of yet.

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How are we fixing it?

After 3+ years of R&D plus countless trial & errors, we finally launched our product last year that can effectively recover blocked / removed impressions due to adblockers while respecting user experience. There is no solution like ours in the market right now and we are extremely proud of what we’ve built. 

Bottom line is, our solutions works for the most number of adblockers in the world. And the numbers prove our point. We have been able to maintain 90%+ adblock recovery rate (% of blocked ads that gets eventually served / recovered to the users). For some other solutions in the market, numbers look close to 15-20%. 

With this new technology, we have been able to onboard 50+ publishers globally within a few months of the launch and send over 1bn requests monthly. Also, we’ve been able to grow 30%+ every month since the launch last year and expect to accelerate this growth this year.

Most importantly, however, our customers have been incredibly happy with our product and expanding their usage across their portfolio websites. We take this as the best compliment to our product & service and are emboldened every day by these satisfied customers. 

And our journey is only getting started.

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What do we want to do?

We have a lofty goal of building a more sustainable, healthy, ad-supported web ecosystem. Given the adblockers have been part of the digital ad ecosystem for a long time, we understand that this is not going to be an easy challenge. But that is why we are so excited about tackling this problem.

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What’s ahead

Since our launch, we’ve been at full speed onboarding new publishers and constantly updating our product. Now that we have secured new funding, we plan to expand our team and accelerate the introduction of our next-gen product in the U.S. and around the world. 

You can read more about our official announcement from Business Wire and various media.

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Join us

If you are looking for next-level solution to access the audience that has been previously unreachable and generate purely incremental revenue from adblock traffic, please reach out to us. 

Also, if you are looking for a lean, high-performing team and genuinely enjoy solving difficult problems, doors are open. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.