Two college drop-outs built an app that fights banner ad blindness, and it just got funded

Atul Agarwal and Ankit Oberoi, co-founders of AdPushUp.

India is still blinkered in many ways. Dropping out of college, even if it is to start a tech company, is a big no-no. But Ankit Oberoi and Atul Agarwal braved ridicule, furious parents, and lots of unsolicited advice to do just that.

A little over a year and one experimental startup later, Oberoi and Agarwal today raised US$632,000 for their second startup AdPushUp. This initial investment came from a bunch of prominent angel investors and serial entrepreneurs in India.

Most online publishers with ad space to sell either work with ad networks like Google AdSense or supply-side platforms like Rubicon for their advertising needs. But the ads are rarely optimized for maximum effectiveness. “We go one step ahead and work on optimizing page-level factors like the placement, size, and type of ad unit on a web page. Using this, we help fight banner blindness and improve click-through rates (CTR) for publishers,” Oberoi explains to Tech in Asia.

Banner blindness or ad blindness is a term used to explain the phenomenon where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information. This is also called banner noise. CTR is a way of measuring the effectiveness of an online advertising campaign by the number of users that click on a specific link.

Optimal effectiveness means constantly testing an ad in different formats and conditions, which is very hard to do for any webmaster.

AdPushUp’s proprietary patent pending product has a machine-learning algorithm, which, Oberoi says can learn and fight banner blindness. And it can easily integrate with a publisher’s current ad server or networks on its existing page layout.

The two founders in their early twenties had co-founded an information security services company called Innobuzz while at college, which gave them the confidence to strike out on their own without waiting to finish college. “We’ve always been fascinated with data, analytics, and testing. Earlier, Atul operated a user-generated content forum which he monetized through AdSense,” Oberoi says. That’s how the concept of AdPushup came to them.

“We scaled from 500,000 monthly ad impressions (through AdPushUp) in March to over 100 million now,” he says.

According to Oberoi, their closest competitor is US-based Ezoic, which claims to test more than 650 ad positions and style combinations on a publisher’s site to pick the best. Last November, it raised US$5.6 million in funding from Balderton Capital, New Amsterdam Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, and private investors.

The angel investors who participated in AdPushUp’s round of funding are veterans in the space. Paras Chopra, founder of Wingify that recently acquired US-based Concept Feedback, Amit Ranjan, co-founder of SlideShare, Jonathan Boutelle, director of technology at LinkedIn, Avlesh Singh, co-founder of WebEngage, and Vikram Kapur, partner with McKinsey & Company, are among the angels betting on the two college drop-outs and their ad product.

See: Here’s why this Indian ad exchange with clients in 200 countries just pivoted

Two college drop-outs built an app that fights banner ad blindness, and it just got funded