Hello readers. Many of you have probably been in New York this week for Advertising Week, beating the Manhattan pavements and travelling between meetings and sponsored events. It’s always a long and arduous one - but always hugely fun and productive. Kevin Flood, our venerable fund GP, was there this year representing FPC. We will all be back next year. No doubt.
The Exit That Happened This Week
So, you might have read the news on the wires and seen the LinkedIn updates: FPC has had an exit. It’s our first. Zeta Global announced this week that it was acquiring our portfolio company, digitalAudience.
Why was DA (digitalAudience) acquired? As we have written extensively over the past few months, data infrastructure is the hottest category in ad tech. And Zeta saw an opportunity to add a strong data tech offering to its AI marketing stack.
We invested in DA four years ago and have worked closely with the company since. We have got to know Ruben, Wouter, Bastiaan and the wider team very well. They are top-class ad tech people - and FPC is delighted for their richly deserved success.
DA has thrived in the most unforgiving ad tech market in the world (namely Europe), building a world-class scaled data infrastructure platform and a strong business. It’s a credit to the DA team.
Positioning A Strategic Asset
FPC worked closely with the DA team on the sale. We helped shape the strategy and positioning. When DA was getting early inbound, we sat down with the management team to map out a plan.
FPC and the DA team refined and elevated a clear position around the data infrastructure category, highlighting DA’s leadership as one of the most critical players outside the US.
And it wasn’t marketing BS either: the company was already working with huge clients and had built the onboarding rails into all the major buying platforms and walled gardens. It was also developing the framework around agentic media buying and AI-powered marketing. In short: DA was a must-have asset.
We followed a playbook we’d developed on a previous European ad tech deal: the Nexta sale to Kevel, where we acted as the sole advisor. It was clear to us that DA and the category it operates in mattered hugely to strategics. Connecting data signals to custom algos and agentic solutions is becoming table stakes for the industry, and the infrastructure underneath it is essential. DA was sitting right in the middle of an ad tech M&A zeitgeist. We just helped execute. That’s easy when you have a great company and a great team.
Farm-To-Table Thesis
So what is FPC now? We build. We invest. We sell companies. We’re certainly not a traditional VC. If we just invested, we’d fail miserably. We always needed to be embedded in the ecosystem. Rich Ashton, our Managing Partner, put it best when he called FirstPartyCapital a Full-Stack Venture firm. FSV, if you will. Yes, another bloody TLA.
There are three key parts to our FSV:
One: we incubate and invest early. One of the standout prospects from Fund 1 is Bedrock Platform, an incubation. It now has a stellar team running the business and is building the next big ad tech category: the Composable Buying Platform. Not hyperbole, just reality. Just as Invite Media established the DSP all those years ago, Bedrock is blazing its own trail. We’ve followed Bedrock Platform up with six new incubations, each breaking new ground in ad tech and establishing a monopoly of one in AAT (Adjacent Ad Tech) categories.
Two: we scale incubations (continuing to invest and bring in new investors). Getting an incubation beyond the concept stage is always a tough task. You want a working product with a path to revenue and profitability. You want to invest enough to give it room to build and grow, but not overinvest. An excessively inflated valuation is a death sentence in this market. We bring in a top-tier team to run our investments and incubations, with meaningful equity and salary funding. We de-risk founding teams and incentivise the path to scale and exit.
There’s so much talent in this market, and we keep working with the best and brightest to build businesses customers want to pay for, and strategics want to buy. That’s also appealing to co-investors looking for relatively de-risked opportunities. Remember, we’re in ad tech: the business of building better mousetraps. We are not building data centres in space.
Three: We sell ad tech. The board always decides who to appoint as an advisor. But FPC now has the track record of making deals happen, especially in the mid-to-lower level valuation range where most bankers/advisors aren’t going to engage.
We know how to position our companies. We know the strategic buyers and what they want to buy. DA and Nexta prove it.
We are focused on getting liquidity for our LPs from Fund 1. And FPC continues to evolve its proposition, optimising for the huge opportunities in this market. It’s been a big (tiring) week, from M&A to tentpole events. Time for some downtime. Thanks for reading, and have a great ad tech day.