C1X Inc, a global marketing tech player, has made a foray in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. The dynamics of business in MEA is different in comparison to other regions. With an early traction in programmatic full stack offering, C1X is looking to make its mark in the market through its header bidding technology, which enables transparency and accuracy for brands and higher yields for publishers.
The fast growing MEA region is pegged at around USD 400 million, and is expected to grow at 22 percent in 2017.
C1X has appointed Pawan Setpal to lead the MEA subsidiary C1X MEA LLC as its Vice President & Head of Business. Mr Setpal will lead the region, based in Dubai. He was last the Director of Sales & Head Of Programmatic at Clique Media prior to which he was Agency Business Director with Yahoo ME and started his career with Maktoob.com that was later acquired by Yahoo.
“Pawan is one of the successful early evangelists in the region. For us the product needs adoption for it to succeed, which is the sole reason why we were looking for someone with in depth knowledge the region’s dynamics and the ecosystem. His experience around supply and demand helps us in positioning our company given we are the only architecture in the space that has solutions across DSP, SSP, ecommerce and ad-serving all in one stack and fully programmatic,” said Rammohan Sundaram, MD & SVP – APMEA.
C1X recently announced its Series B funding led by Venture Labo Investments, Japan and has raised USD 14 million since 2015. Its header bidding technology and audience discovery are some of the key aspects for its growth so far, and is now expanding globally.
“MEA is in its nascent stage of digital revolution as compared to other markets worldwide, which is even more the reason for bringing in the right technology that will help marketers, agencies and publishers. We will have a clear first mover advantage through our differentiated offering in a full stack environment and I am very excited about the opportunity that lies ahead of us. Our ecommerce solution is revolutionary and benefits not just the sellers in a marketplace environment but creates a completely new revenue line for the platform owners. My immediate goal is to build the team and get cracking on supply that our platform will then filter out to create the premiums from the audience that are being discovered,” added Mr Setpal.
C1X is in a unique position to not only offer guaranteed buys but also RTB for non-guaranteed inventory with audience discovery being the key. C1X is based in the valley with offices in Santa Clara, Omaha, New York, Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai with development centers in Chennai and Bangalore, India.
