What comes to mind when you hear about a company receiving a significant investment from a venture capital firm? For some, it’s accelerated growth plans or completely changing the trajectory of the company's vision and culture. For others, it’s an opportunity to invest in core business functions such as technology and marketing.
In May 2024, Screenverse secured a $10.5 million investment from Boston-based growth equity firm Volition Capital. The investment, led by Managing Partner Larry Chang, was one of the largest investments in programmatic digital out-of-home (prDOOH). It marked a significant milestone in our journey as a company and sent signals to the OOH industry that programmatic is no longer an option, but a necessity.
With the OOH industry evolving—surpassing $9 billion in 2024—and prDOOH being a key driver of that growth, Volition Capital's investment has given us the opportunity to lead the expansion of programmatic DOOH to its full potential.
We sat down with Screenverse Co-Founders Adam Malone and David Weinfeld to reflect on the last year with Volition Capital. From the inception of our partnership to expanding our team globally, we’re sharing some of our milestones and learnings along the way.
Why we chose to partner with Volition Capital
Before the investment, we began our relationship with Volition Capital as with any potential partner we work with—through a series of open conversations and a rigorous due diligence process.
David Weinfeld shares what sparked his interest in working with the Boston-based growth equity firm. “With Volition, we connected with the ethos and philosophy of the firm, specifically because a significant amount of deal flow is driven by outbound. There’s something about that flow that we at Screenverse connect with. After all, that is how we founded our business, with everything being outbound. Additionally, at Volition, it is clear that their foundation is built on the mantra of ‘we’re going to go out and win.’ I love that. Their emphasis on resourcefulness, tenacity, and grit also connected with us.”
At the time, Screenverse had just celebrated its fourth anniversary in business, something many startup companies look forward to every year. Our team consisted of 22 employees across the United States and 14 media network partners.
“We were in a very special position when we raised investment from Volition,” says David. “We didn't need to raise investment; frankly, we didn't think we were at the right spot in our journey to enter a full-fledged fundraising process. One of the great things about my partnership with Adam is that we have aligned expectations and understanding on how those outside our industry perceive the OOH channel and our business. We know that believing in the truly exponential potential of OOH is a contrarian view that not everyone can see. It was clear from our first conversations with Volition Capital and Larry that he saw what we saw as a significant opportunity.”
With this unique opportunity, we mapped out our game plan for the next 12 months:
- Invest in people: welcome talented individuals across engineering, sales, client services, marketing, finance, supply partnerships, and more.
- Invest in technology: build a robust technology suite to optimize the performance of our network partners and deliver higher efficiencies.
A year of growth and expansion
As a 100% remote company, we’ve always believed that talent has no physical bounds—not to an office space or a zip code. Therefore, with the guidance and support of the Volition team, we almost doubled the size of our company, expanding from 22 employees to 42 across the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, and Mexico, among others. We streamlined our operations, constituted a board of directors, expanded our leadership team, and never lost sight of what matters the most: our people and partners.
Every department at Screenverse welcomed new astronauts to better support our demand-side and supply-side partners with a strong emphasis on recruiting and more than doubling the engineering team to scale our proprietary technology suite.
As the exclusive programmatic seller and ad monetization partner for DOOH networks, our partners rely on our people and technology to unlock new opportunities, optimize performance, and increase advertisers' demand. By investing in our people and technology, we’ve stayed true to what we do best while delivering even stronger results for our partners.
Speaking of partners, within the last 12 months, we’ve welcomed five media partners across new venue types such as gyms/fitness centers, taxi tops/transit, urban panels/street level OOH, cinemas/movie theaters, and elevators across 20+ venue types. The strategic expansion of our inventory enables advertisers to maximize coverage of the consumer journey across 100,000+ digital screens within the Screenverse portfolio.
When asked about something that has stood out in the last year working with the Volition team, Adam Malone shares, “One of the things that was heartening for me was after the first or second board meeting they (Volition) made it clear that they believed in us, they liked our business model and the fact that we’ve been growing methodically; but they want to expand our margin for error so that we can be more aggressive and strategic with our plans but without changing the core philosophy of our way of doing business”
The future of Screenverse and Volition Capital
Although it’s only been a year since the investment, our partnership with Volition Capital has quickly proven to be strong, reliable, and thriving—laying the foundation for continued success.
Larry Chang, managing partner at Volition and Screenverse board member, shares his perspective on the last year: “Adam and David have been exactly who we had hoped for: authentic, passionate, hardworking founders. They are ambitious, coachable, and have a strong desire to learn from the Volition team. I couldn’t have asked for a better duo; they’ve been phenomenal to work with.”
As we expand our company globally, we look forward to serving our partners and clients with utmost transparency, driving continued innovation, and providing the best-in-class white-glove service.
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