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§ Private Profile · Elielinaukio 2g Fl 4, Helsinki, Uusimaa 00100, FI
Smartly.io is a company.
Smartly.io has raised $245.6M across 3 funding rounds.
Key people at Smartly.io.
Smartly.io has raised $245.6M in total across 3 funding rounds.
Smartly.io delivers an AI-powered advertising platform that unifies creative and media workflows to streamline cross-channel ad creation and optimization. The platform integrates capabilities for creative design and scaling, intelligent media spend optimization, and comprehensive campaign performance insights, applying artificial intelligence across these functions to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. This approach aims to provide a cohesive solution for managing digital advertising efforts.
The company was founded in 2013 by Kristo Ovaska and Tuomo Riekki. Their founding insight centered on the need for a more integrated advertising model, where insights, automation, and creative processes would work together from inception. They sought to reinvent the advertising landscape by fostering a collaborative environment between strategy, creative, and media teams, moving beyond traditional, fragmented approaches.
Smartly.io serves a diverse clientele of ambitious brands, including agency, performance, brand, and creative teams seeking to enhance their digital advertising outcomes. The company's vision is to transform complex and disjointed advertising operations into fully aligned, performance-driven systems. By orchestrating strategy, creative execution, and media deployment, Smartly.io aims to enable better designed and more impactful advertising campaigns.
Smartly.io has raised $245.6M in total across 3 funding rounds.
Smartly.io's investors include Davis Noell, Irena Goldenberg, Lifeline Ventures.
Key people at Smartly.io.
Smartly.io has raised $245.6M across 3 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $222.8M Other Equity in December 2019.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 18, 2019 | $222.8M Venture Round | Davis Noell | — | Announced |
| Sep 19, 2017 | $20M Venture Round | Irena Goldenberg | — | Announced |
| Jun 10, 2015 | $2.8M Series A | Lifeline Ventures | — | Announced |
Smartly.io is an AI-powered advertising technology platform that unifies creative production, media activation, and performance optimization to help brands manage, scale, and optimize high-performance campaigns across channels like social media, Connected TV (CTV), open web, and more.[1][3][4][5] It serves over 700 brands and advertisers, including Fortune 500 companies like Samsung, Spotify, Uber, and Ralph Lauren, by solving the fragmentation between creative teams and media buying—delivering PwC-validated results such as 5.5x return on ad spend (ROAS) and 42 minutes saved per hour.[1][4][5] Ranked as the leader in *The Forrester Wave™: Creative Advertising Technologies*, Smartly enables agencies, performance teams, brand teams, and creative teams to launch faster, personalize at scale, and drive better outcomes through AI-driven intelligence.[1][3][5]
The platform's growth momentum is strong, managing over $6 billion in global ad spend with partnerships across major platforms like Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, and TikTok.[5] Recent expansions in 2025 include new creative intelligence tools like Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, extending AI capabilities to pre- and post-campaign analysis across channels including CTV.[1]
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Smartly.io emerged to address inefficiencies in digital advertising, starting with AI-driven solutions for social media campaigns.[3][7] The company's evolution reflects the shift toward integrated AI platforms: from early media buying and creative automation to a unified system combining creative, media, and intelligence across the open and closed web.[2][3][4] Key milestones include strategic partnerships with tech giants and recognition as a Forrester leader, with 2025 marking expansions into CTV and advanced predictive tools amid a hybrid workforce supporting global operations.[1][2][5][7]
While specific founders are not detailed in available sources, Smartly's backstory centers on its mission to transform advertising by bridging creative and performance gaps, achieving early traction through proven ROAS and efficiency gains that attracted major brands.[1][4][5]
Smartly rides the AI-driven advertising revolution, where generative AI collapses barriers between creativity and performance, enabling hyper-personalized, data-optimized ads amid rising CTV and open-web fragmentation.[1][5][6] Timing is ideal as marketers face pressure for measurable ROI in a cookieless future—Smartly's platform anticipates this by predicting creative performance pre-launch and automating insights, influencing ecosystem shifts toward unified creative-media stacks.[1][4] Market forces like exploding ad spend ($6B+ managed) and partnerships with Big Tech amplify its reach, while events like ADVANCE position it as a thought leader decoding AI's role in marketing evolution.[5] By empowering brands to achieve superior ROAS, Smartly shapes a more efficient, consumer-connected ad landscape.
Smartly is poised to dominate AI advertising with ongoing expansions into CTV and predictive intelligence, potentially capturing more of the $1T+ global ad market as AI matures.[1][5] Trends like conversational commerce, video scaling, and cross-channel orchestration will fuel growth, especially with regulatory pushes for privacy-first personalization. Its influence may evolve from platform provider to industry agenda-setter, as seen in ADVANCE, driving broader adoption of "intelligent creative." This positions Smartly as essential for ambitious brands seeking synchronized creative-media firepower—unlocking performance where others fragment.
