Less than a year after pulling in $9 million in a 2021 seed funding round, Santa Monica-based Trust Software Inc. announced on April 19 that it has raised an additional $30 million in debt and equity financing to grow its signature digital marketing platform.
Chief Executive James Borow, former global director of product strategy at Snap Inc., founded the startup in 2019 with fellow Snap veterans Daniel Druger, Sean Friedland, Chris Lorenz and Geoffrey Anderson.
Borow said the founding team played an instrumental role in building the advertising platform that generates the vast majority of Snap’s revenue. Through this experience, said Borow, they also realized the need for a digital marketing platform serving smaller brands and vendors.
Trust allows online merchants to make digital ad buys with extended payment terms and to in turn gain access to aggregated performance and spending data collected through other users of the company’s network.
“You can see how money is moving and can compare your brand’s performance to others, which can help better inform future decisions,” said Borow in an email. “Right now, for example, brands on the network can see what’s happening with pricing across several digital advertising channels and the spend mix across the network”.
The company said its network has since August indexed more than $500 million in digital ad buys, collecting anonymized data from more than 650,000 individual transactions. Trust said its latest funding, which includes a $25 million credit line from Upper90 Capital Management, will be used to support the expansion of its brand network.
The larger the network grows, said Borow, the more insights brands will be able to gain and the more they will be able to keep up with major advertisers, which often have access to better spending data than smaller companies and receive more favorable terms when making purchases.
Trust also announced that yet another Snap alum, Matt Trandall, is joining the company as senior vice president of partnerships and community.
