In 2001, Shawn Riegsecker decided to start a company whose mission was to build the most comprehensive and automated digital media buying and operations platform between buyers and sellers on the market.
A series of interviews with innovators operating at the intersection of consumer behavior and business transformation: Shawn Riegsecker, Founder and CEO, CENTRO.I was in the newspaper business for a couple of years and then in '96 got into digital and helped publish the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio on the web. It was the third newspaper in the country that started publishing content on the internet. Then, I went up to Cleveland and helped with the Plain Dealer's newspaper on the web.
The first four years were just about survival and trying to stay alive. I raised a couple million dollars in '05 and '06, and that's when we started coding the first version of our platform. As a result, we had to build automated software, because buying thousands among thousands of local sites directly was difficult and time-consuming. So, we did that. The goal was to build the platform and then license it to ad agencies.
We spent four years and more than $100 million rebuilding everything from scratch without a dollar of revenue coming in for it. I was not very popular with a lot of my team members and investors. It was a rough and challenging few years getting through that.did our series A in 2010 with FTV for $22.5 million. Then, we raised our series B in 2015 with Neuberger Berman for $30 million.Yes, but it was a very trying four years.
Delayed gratification is hard. For someone to say I'm going to take four years and spend over $100 million to rebuild everything, that's a hard pill to swallow. It gives us confidence that we've got a more comprehensive and broader platform that goes a lot deeper than anything else on the market. Everything is connected and we've got a foundation that we can build on top of a lot faster than most competition, if not all of the competition, in the advertising space today.
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