Mumbai : Proof of Performance Data Services (PoP), an outdoor advertising monitoring firm that the Bharatiya Janata Party hired last year to audit its Lok Sabha campaign, is looking to raise some bridge fund to support its expansion in Indonesia and Africa.
The company is also looking at a Series A funding — which is the first round of funding after seed capital where for the first time company stake is offered to venture capital investors in the form of preferred stock — in the next 6 to 9 months, said Harjap Singh, founder and managing director at PoP.
He declined to divulge how much capital the company plans to raise. “So far we were focused on just developing the tools and technologies for the outdoor space. But we are now focused on growing the revenues aggressively,” Singh said.
Its international foray is part of this move. While the outdoor sector is ranked at number three or four in India, in Africa it is the second biggest medium after TV, Singh said. “We are looking at a revenue sharing model in Africa where we will control the technological end and the local partner will help us with local knowledge and data capture,” he said. The local partner in Africa will upload the data on the PoP server and the data analytics will be done in Delhi.
Last month, PoP hired Rajeev Puri as its CEO. “His primary mandate is to leverage our experience in the outdoor space and open up more doors, while I will continue to focus on the technology part,” Singh said.
He said PoP is working to launch big data in the outdoor space. “We will launch a tool in the next six months that will merge outdoor with social media, location intelligence and mobile data. So if a consumer watches an ad on a billboard he will soon get updates about that brand on twitter or other social media platforms,” Singh said.
