Viant (Nasdaq: DSP) burst into trading on Feb. 10 priced at $25 per share, rapidly climbing to $64 in the following days and closing the first week with a market cap around $3.8 billion.
The company’s valuation had settled back to about $2.5 billion as of last week. It raised about $250 million in gross proceeds from the IPO.
Viant is positioning itself to grab a larger share of the digital advertising market, helping advertising agencies and marketers get placement for their customers across a variety of channels, including desktops, mobile phones, connected TVs, streaming audio and digital billboards.
Chief executive Tim Vanderhook, who turned 40 on Valentine’s Day, said the company ended last year with 289 employees, which represents headcount growth of 13% from the prior year-end.
They are located in 10 offices around the U.S., including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Atlanta, in addition to Irvine.
“This growth demonstrates the continued investments we are making in headcount as we continue to scale our business,” Vanderhook told the Business Journal.
“We expect total headcount to increase approximately 30% in 2021, with a particular focus in the area of sales and marketing, as we continue to invest in the growth opportunity in front of us.”
The company said it had already increased to 321 employees as of last month. As part of the growth strategy, Viant announced earlier this month that Kendra Angier has joined as chief people officer, a newly created position in Viant’s C-Suite of top executives.
Angier will lead Viant’s people strategy and operations, which includes talent acquisition and development, performance management, and inclusion in the workplace, reporting to the CEO. Angier had served most recently as a vice president of HR at Ingram Micro in Irvine.
Viant on April 13 also announced the appointment of Rasika Narang, an alumna of global advertising agency Ogilvy, to the newly created role of senior vice president of marketing.
Ad Buying Software
Viant’s Adelphic DSP enterprise software platform lets marketers and their agencies execute programmatic advertising campaigns, allowing them to buy ads anywhere electronically.
“Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of online advertising,” said monthly newsletter Acuity Insights. “This automation makes transactions efficient and more effective, streamlining the process and consolidating your digital advertising efforts in one technology platform.”
Or as online trade magazine Digiday summed things up a few years ago: “It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.”
Viant is located at the busy intersection of Michelson Drive and Jamboree Road in Irvine, about a mile from John Wayne Airport. It leases 47,000 square feet in a building it shares with Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries (
Asked whether the company will stay in its current headquarters as it grows, Vanderhook said: “We’ll continue to evaluate our employee needs and will adjust accordingly. I can tell you that our ties to Irvine are very important to us and we remain appreciative in being a part of the Orange County community.”
Viant’s latest annual report, filed last month, notes that the company’s lease at the 2722 Michelson building runs through mid-2022, and that for now its “facilities are adequate to meet our current needs.”
Viant was advertising for more than 40 positions on its website as of April 12, ranging from director of sales to database administrator and business analyst.
Yorba Linda Start
The Vanderhook brothers—Tim, Chris and Russ—started the company out of their parents’ home in Yorba Linda more than two decades ago. They have had to compete against larger companies in the booming digital advertising space such as Google and Facebook.
Viant’s twists and turns include selling a majority stake in the company to Time Inc. in 2016 before buying it back in 2019 from a different company, in what regulatory filings indicate was a $25 million deal.
Tim Vanderhook on April 7 praised his co-workers for the “incredible amount of resilience” they have shown during the pandemic and work-from-home directives, in written answers to questions posed by the Business Journal.
Tim Vanderhook declined to comment on the fluctuations in the company’s stock price since the IPO, saying only “we believe that we have a significant opportunity for growth.”
“We intend to increase our investment in sales and marketing to scale our customer base and capitalize on marketers adopting people-based software, like our Adelphic DSP, as their primary programmatic media buying and measurement software,” the CEO said.
Viant’s customers are advertising buyers, including large advertising holding companies, independent advertising agencies, mid-market advertising service organizations, as well as marketers that rely on the company’s self-service software platform.
Before the Feb. 10 IPO, Viant may have been best known nationally for its purchase of social networking site Myspace a decade ago.
It’s still part of the company’s portfolio.
“We are the proud owners of Myspace, but there are no updates,” Tim Vanderhook said.
