Why we backed Drovo — the largest moving media network in the making

Drovo’s demo car catching the attention of Londoners

As a VC reviewing a myriad of opportunities every month, you risk missing out on true gems just by relying too much on pattern matching and letting your biases run wild. It’s easy to dismiss certain verticals because there hasn’t been much recent innovation. Or so you might believe blindly…

This almost happened to us when we first heard about Drovo. Initially, it seemed like they had built a basic advertising solution for taxi fleets. You know, the classic illuminated ad boxes on top of taxi roofs. Perhaps good enough to build a significant local business, but certainly not at a “venture scale,” right?

Lo and behold, were we in for a surprise after hearing the pitch from Drovo’s founder, Artjom Jekimtsev. It turns out they had instead developed a full-fledged programmatic transit ad platform, connecting vehicle owners with advertisers to deliver highly targeted and measurable out-of-home (OOH) advertising. Essentially, it allows for real-time location-based retargeting at a much more effective rate than traditional social media advertising.

Once again, all this sophistication speaks to the quality of the founders and the team. The resourceful founder duo of Artjom and Jason have applied layers of novel technologies on top of what might otherwise seem like a basic business. The resulting solution is a win-win-win scalable model that brings together advertisers, fleet operators, as well as drivers and incentivizes all parties to collaborate in an orchestrated manner. If we project this years into the future, it becomes evident how this could evolve into one of the largest moving media networks.

And Drovo has a growing client base to show for it, including Deliveroo, Paco Rabanne, Uniqlo and American Express, enabling these fleet operators to passively earn additional income while carrying out their usual business.

As a cherry on top of the cake — with just £1.5m previously raised, all this progress has been achieved with such cost efficiency that Drovo is already ‘default alive’, to borrow a term from the legendary Paul Graham of the YC.

As such, we are truly excited to embark on Drovo’s programmatic ad journey by participating in their Series A funding round, led by Maven Capital Partners. Stay tuned for more good news and any new job openings by Drovo.