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The company has offices in North America, India, Singapore, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and France.
dataxu uses combinatorial algorithms originally developed for guiding NASA’s Mars mission plans by company co-founder Willard Simmons, while he was attending his graduate studies at the MIT aeronautics and astronautics lab of Professor Ed Crawley. The company was founded by Willard Simmons, Mike Baker, R. Bruce Journey and Sandro Catanzaro in 2009 with headquarters in Boston. In 2011, dataxu co-founded the OpenRTB consortium (now the RTB Project) that produced a standard for programmatic media that was adopted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. In 2012 dataxu acquired the company Mexad and in 2014 JasperLabs. As of that year dataxu had raised $55.8 million in financing and had revenues of $118 million. By 2015 the company was valued at $1 billion USD. In 2016 the company received $10 million in financing from SkyMedia.
dataxu's TouchPoint platform is a real-time bidding platform that shows fifty billion ads for purchase each day, where clients purchase ad space in accordance with the recommendations of dataxu's algorithms. Client data is assimilated into the platform, which analyzes what ads from a particular campaign have engaged with customers in desired ways. It then follows the behavioral trail of those users to determine the efficacy of the ads shown on its platform. This information is used to produce predictive analysis of what various ad spaces will result in and how users will behave. Companies that use the platform include Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, Epson, Universal, Lexus and Sony. The platform is enabled with anti-fraud detection, which prevent fraudulent ad space from being sold. The data from this is compiled into an annual Advertising Fraud Report. DataXu also refunds money to clients who have purchased fraudulent ads. In 2016, the platform added a pre-bid viewability function.
dataxu was ranked by the Inc. 500 in 2013. That year dataxu co-founder and CEO Mike Baker was named "Entrepreneur of the Year, New England Region" by Ernst & Young.