Topsort Raises $8 Million in Seed Funding For Auction Based Advertising

Regina Ye, founder of Topsort, was a Shopify seller in college and found two problems with then advertising solutions: Complex structure of monetizing those channels and lack of direct promotional tools made available by the retail channels. 

Ye, Michael Ostrovsky (Stanford Professor) and Francisco Larrain (Serial Entrepreneur), investigated how to innovate in this space. Leveraging Ostrovsky's expertise in marketplace design and auction theory, the trio started Topsort in 2021. The intent of Topsort is to provide an auction-based advertising technology, through APIs, enabling smaller players to easily promote, without the reliance on cookies, as they will not be used in the near future.

According to Larrain, the campaigns/auctions using Topsort API's can run in as little as 20 milliseconds at 10,000 requests per second and Ye added that Topsort can guarantee between 2x to 4x in returns depending on the marketplace.

“I don’t agree that ads should be a guessing game,” Ye added. “This is very much a clean way of doing advertising, and we fill the gap with no privacy data, but math and machine learning. What sets us apart is how easy it is, which is why advertising technology has traditionally had a bad rep.”

The company raised $8 million in seed funding from marketplace investors including Pear Ventures, Quiet Capital, FJLabs, Micky Malka (Ribbit Capital), Lydia Jett (SoftBank), Akhil Paul, Comma VC and a group of individual investors. 

Topsort gained customers in the last four months and the new funding will be used to grow sales and marketing team, to deepen the footprint in Latin American and Asia.

“We are hitting a point where we have gone from zero to one, and all of the investors doubled down,” Ye said. “We’ve hit our customers in their ramp-up, but we would love to be there earlier. This area is so misunderstood, and we want to do more user education and come up with different ranges of products to also help smaller marketplaces get started as we work with all marketplaces at a different scale.”