MixRank (YC S11) raises $1.5M to sell small advertisers a spy tool for AdSense

MixRank was a display-advertising competitive-intelligence startup from Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch, co-founded by Ilya Lichtenstein, who came from affiliate marketing, and Scott Milliken, who built most of the architecture. It launched on 2011-06-30 as a free service that crawled pages running Google AdSense and estimated which ad copy and traffic sources actually worked; TechCrunch called it a spy tool for AdSense and reported 93,000 sites indexed at launch.

The pitch was that small brands could not afford the teams of copywriters, researchers and testers big advertisers used, so MixRank handed them the evidence instead: which wording a competitor was testing, which calls to action won, and which sites sent the traffic. Google sorts ads by effectiveness, so MixRank read that ordering to estimate performance, and the founders' roadmap pointed at modeling the whole display market.

On 2011-12-13 TechCrunch reported a $1.5M round from 500 Startups, Mark Cuban, IAB founder Rich LeFurgy, MediaTrust chairman Peter Bordes, Leadclick founder Robert Afshar, Adify co-founder Larry Braitman, Chart.io co-founder David Beyer, Tom McInerney, Matt Ocko and Zachary Bogue, raised via AngelList. By then more than 4,000 advertisers were building display campaigns on the platform, and the money was earmarked for the engineering team and deeper analytics.