Christian Facey and Wilfrid Obeng met in Dublin in late 2017. Facey was a strategist at Google, on its agency team, and later at Facebook, where he measured the value of ads and how people are influenced into buying products and services. Obeng was an engineer at Google, on its ads team. Facey also had a sideline hobby that kept him busy: mobile games. “I started digitizing Japanese watercolour artwork, and streaming my own jazz music into those games,” he says. “We were both very interested in being entrepreneurial,” says Obeng. “We were bashing our heads together as to what we could do.”
At the time, Obeng “Started seeing audio advertising booming, because of the likes of Spotify,” he says. “People started to realize they could actually reach customers with audio.” In early 2020, the pair left their jobs and built a minimum viable product to show how their idea—inserting audio adverts into games—could work. “It was very basic, very scrappy—and didn’t work all the time, to be honest with you,” says Obeng. But it showed the principle of what they believed would be a major business, and a new sector for the ad industry.
The pitch from AudioMob—the company the two launched in early 2020— was simple: Audio adverts in games were less intrusive for users, who could continue to play while they listened to an advert over the top of gameplay. In an attention economy, you were still grabbing their interest, while not interrupting them. “That’s how we got our first pool of investment,” says Obeng, who became chief technology officer to Facey’s CEO.
“We received rejections from numerous VCs during our seed stage, but always asked for feedback, which we used to identify product development areas,” says Obeng. “It was the tech stuff we’ve been building, and the IP of the patents, as well as the opportunities outside of gaming."
Following a £750,000 investment from a media and entertainment venture capital company, as well as $2 million from seed funders (“Including Supernode Global, one of the VCs firms who originally chose not to invest, due to the shortcomings of our original pitch,” says Obeng), the company secured $14 million in Series A funding, valuing AudioMob at $110 million. “Attracting investors requires a great product, solid business case, strong storytelling, and, most importantly, perseverance,” says Obeng.
AudioMob believes its audio ad technology could be used not only in games, but the whole app ecosystem. “You could put it into dating or weather apps,” says Obeng. The company is developing new potential integrations and opportunities from their moonshot lab, based in Abu Dhabi. “We understand from times in the tech industry that one of the most important things to do is not just rely on this ad ecosystem, but also to look at the loads of other opportunities that present themselves, otherwise you can soon find yourself displaced,” says Obeng. AudioMob has since served up audio ads for high-profile clients, from Ed Sheeran to Intel and Jeep.
“I’ve had tremendous support from Google,” says Obeng. After their successful review and interview process for Google for Startups’ Black Founders Fund in Europe, Google helped connect with mentor and product experts, and brought them into the Google support ecosystem. Google for Startups’ Black Founders Fund in Europe provides cash awards to companies without asking for equity in return, alongside hands-on support to help Black entrepreneurs like Obeng and Facey build and grow their businesses.
It’s one of a trio of high-touch programs from the tech company that support home-grown innovation and job growth by igniting conversations about what success means for founders, and how to achieve it. Supporting young companies since 2012, Google for Startups builds community to share the realities of the journey as founders, changing the conversation about the task of setting up and running a business, and celebrating successes often overlooked in the narrative about startups.
Support from Google for Startups helped AudioMob as it grew from two people in 2020, to a team of 33 employees in London and Abu Dhabi, servicing clients worldwide in the space of eight months. “The benefits have been fantastic,” says Obeng, who lists every- thing from Google Cloud credits, to help building and developing of the software, to conversations with Google Privacy teams to ensure best practices to keep users secure. “They were really helpful if there was anything we wanted,” he says.
Google for Startups also helped AudioMob’s founders navigate balancing work demands and life challenges. “As founders, this can be difficult to achieve, especially in the early stages of a company, as there were so many roles which needed to be assumed,” says Obeng. “However, as we grew, this has improved with the exceptional talent we were able to hire.”
Those hires also needed to be right, and for that, Obeng and Facey decided to shun the standard requirements most companies look for in favor of an alternative metric: How well they’d work in the company. “Always prioritize cultural fit over performance,” says Obeng. “This is easier said than done—however, it is crucial to team morale and relationships. It is important to believe in your team’s ability to execute.” He adds that businesses grow in ways beyond the bottom line, and a healthy company culture is a key performance indicator to follow.
Not that AudioMob is lacking in traditional KPIs: “When it comes to commercial traction, we’ve got case studies in every single major vertical,” says Facey. But that’s not what he’s most proud of. “I do feel the rigor behind our R&D efforts is really overlooked,” he explains. “We had to not only create this industry in the most literal sense, but then validate it as well.”
That validation includes plans for an IPO. “The reason our valuation is so high, and why we got investors like Google, Makers Fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners, is because we have a very specific plan through to IPO,” says Facey. “We see AudioMob as being pretty much the ultimate audio content delivery platform."
For more information about Google for Startups' offering, visit startup.google.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
