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UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

 

FORM 10-K

 

(Mark One)

☒

ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021

OR

☐

TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the transition period from                      to                     

Commission file number 001-40015

 

Viant Technology Inc.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

 

 

Delaware

85-3447553

(State or other jurisdiction of

incorporation or organization)

(I.R.S. Employer

Identification No.)

2722 Michelson Drive, Suite 100

Irvine, CA

92612

(Address of principal executive offices)

(Zip Code)

Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: (949) 861-8888

 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

 

Title of each class

 

Trading

Symbol(s)

 

Name of each exchange on which registered

Class A common stock, par value $0.001 per share

 

DSP

 

The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC

(Nasdaq Global Select Market)

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes ☐ No ☒

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act.  Yes ☐ No ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.  Yes ☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to submit such files).  Yes ☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

 

Large accelerated filer

 

☐

  

Accelerated filer

 

☐

 

 

 

 

Non-accelerated filer

 

☒

  

Smaller reporting company

 

☐

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emerging growth company

 

☒

 

 

 

 

 

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act.  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report.  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act).  Yes  ☐No ☒

The aggregate market value of the voting and non-voting common equity held by non-affiliates of the Registrant, based on the closing price of the shares of Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on June 30, 2021, the last business day of the Registrant’s most recently completed second fiscal quarter, was approximately $342.5 million.

As of March 8, 2022, there were 13,741,508 shares and 47,082,260 shares of the registrant’s Class A and Class B common stock, respectively, $0.001 par value per share, outstanding.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the registrant’s definitive proxy statement for its 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, which the registrant intends to file pursuant to Regulation 14A with the Securities and Exchange Commission not later than 120 days after the registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

Page

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

3

RISK FACTOR SUMMARY

3

PART I

 

 

Item 1.

Business

5

Item 1A.

Risk Factors

19

Item 1B.

Unresolved Staff Comments

51

Item 2.

Properties

51

Item 3.

Legal Proceedings

51

Item 4.

Mine Safety Disclosures

51

 

 

 

PART II

 

 

Item 5.

Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

52

Item 6.

Selected Financial Data

55

Item 7.

Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

58

Item 7A.

Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk

82

Item 8.

Financial Statements and Supplementary Data

77

Item 9.

Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure

110

Item 9A.

Controls and Procedures

110

Item 9B.

Other Information

111

Item 9C.

Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections

111

 

 

 

PART III

 

 

Item 10.

Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance

112

Item 11.

Executive Compensation

112

Item 12.

Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters

112

Item 13.

Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence

112

Item 14.

Principal Accountant Fees and Services

112

 

 

 

PART IV

 

 

Item 15.

Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules

112

Item 16.

Form 10-K Summary

115

 

Signatures

116

 

 

 

2

 

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K (“Annual Report”) contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements, other than statements of historical fact included in this Annual Report, including, without limitation, statements regarding our financial position, business strategy and other plans and objectives for our future operations, are forward-looking statements. These statements include declarations regarding our management’s beliefs and current expectations. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by words such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “could,” “intend,” “consider,” “expect,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict” or “continue” or the negative of such words or other similar terms or expressions. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report include, but are not limited to, statements about: our future financial performance, including our revenue, cost of revenue, gross profit, contribution excluding traffic acquisition costs (“contribution ex-TAC”), adjusted EBITDA, and operating expenses; trends in our key business measures; the sufficiency of our cash and cash provided by sales of our products and services to meet our liquidity needs; market trends; our market position and opportunity; our growth strategy and business aspirations for our demand side platform in enabling the programmatic purchase of advertising in the digital advertising industry; our product strategy; our efforts to enhance the security and privacy of our platform; the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures on our business, the business of our customers, suppliers and channel partners, and the economy; our ability to attract new customers and retain existing customers; our ability to successfully expand into our existing markets and into new markets; our ability to effectively manage our growth and future expenses; and the impact of recent accounting pronouncements on our consolidated financial statements.

Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. As a result, you should not put undue reliance on any forward-looking statement. These forward-looking statements are included throughout this Annual Report. Factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the risk factors discussed in the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report.

The forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report are based on historical performance and management’s current plans, estimates and expectations in light of information currently available to us and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. There can be no assurance that future developments affecting us will be those that we have anticipated. Actual results may differ materially from these expectations due to changes in global, regional or local political, economic, business, competitive, market, regulatory and other factors, many of which are beyond our control, as well as the other factors described in the section entitled “Risk Factors.” Additional factors or events that could cause our actual results to differ may also emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all of them. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should any of our assumptions prove to be incorrect, our actual results may vary in material respects from what we may have expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements, and we caution that you should not place undue reliance on any of our forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement made by us in this Annual Report speaks only as of the date on which we make it. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable securities laws. You should read this Annual Report, and the documents that we reference in this Annual Report and have filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), with the understanding that our actual future results, performance, and events and circumstances may be materially different from what we expect.

RISK FACTOR SUMMARY

Our business is subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those described in the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report. You should carefully consider these risks and uncertainties when investing in our Class A common stock. Some of the principal risks and uncertainties include the following:

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Our success and revenue growth are dependent on adding new customers, effectively educating and training our existing customers on how to make full use of our platform and increasing usage of our platform by our customers;

 

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We may not realize the expected benefits of an industry shift away from cookie-based consumer tracking as such shift may not occur as rapidly as we expect or may not be realized at all;

 

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The effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other adverse market events have had, and could in the future have, an adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition;

 

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If we fail to innovate and make the right investment decisions in our offerings and platform, we may not attract and retain customers and our revenue and results of operations may decline;

 

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The market for programmatic advertising is evolving. If this market develops slower or differently than we expect, our business, operating results and financial condition would be adversely affected;

 

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We receive a significant amount of revenue from a select number of advertising agency holding companies, owning various advertising agencies, and the loss of advertising agencies as customers could harm our business, operating results and financial condition;

 

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We often have long sales cycles, which can result in significant time between initial contact with a prospect and execution of a customer agreement, making it difficult to project when, if at all, we will obtain new customers and when we will generate revenue from those customers;

 

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If our access to advertising inventory is diminished or fails to grow, our revenue could decline and our growth could be impeded;

 

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If our access to people-based data is diminished, the effectiveness of our platform would be decreased, which could harm our operating results and financial condition;

 

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We are subject to stringent and changing obligations related to data privacy and security. Our actual or perceived failure to comply with such obligations could lead to regulatory investigations or actions, litigation, fines and penalties, disruptions of our business operations, reputational harm, loss of customers or sales, revenue declines, increase the cost of data, reduce the availability of data, adversely affect the demand for our products and services, or other adverse business consequences;

 

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Our business or ability to operate our platform could be impacted by changes in the technology industry by technology companies, end users, or government regulation. Such developments, including the restriction of “third-party cookies,” could cause instability in the advertising technology industry;

 

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A significant inadvertent disclosure or breach of our information technology systems or data, or of the security of our or our customers’, suppliers’, or other third parties’ upon which we rely could be detrimental to our business, reputation and results of operations;

 

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Our proprietary rights may be difficult to enforce, which could enable others to copy or use aspects of our technology without compensating us, thereby eroding our competitive advantages and harming our business;

 

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Our business is subject to a wide range of laws and regulations, many of which are evolving, and failure to comply with such laws and regulations could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations;

 

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We may experience fluctuations in our operating results, which could make our future operating results difficult to predict or cause our operating results to fall below securities analysts’ and investors’ expectations;

 

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As our costs increase, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to sustain profitability;

 

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The market price of our Class A common stock has been and may continue to be volatile or may decline regardless of our operating performance, and you could lose all or part of your investment;

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We are a “controlled company” within the meaning of the listing standards of the Nasdaq Global Select Market and, as a result, qualify for, and rely on, exemptions from certain corporate governance requirements. You do not have the same protections afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to such requirements; and

 

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If we fail to maintain or implement effective internal controls, we may not be able to report financial results accurately or on a timely basis, or to detect fraud, which could have a material adverse effect on our business and the per share price of our Class A common stock.

PART I

Item 1. Business.

Our Company

We are an advertising software company. Our software enables the programmatic purchase of advertising, which is the electronification of the advertising buying process. Programmatic advertising is rapidly taking market share from traditional ad sales channels, which require more staffing, offer less transparency and involve higher costs to buyers.

Our demand side platform (“DSP”), Adelphic, is an enterprise software platform that is used by marketers and their advertising agencies to centralize the planning, buying and measurement of their advertising across most channels. Through our technology, a marketer can easily buy ads on desktop, mobile, connected TV, linear TV, in-game streaming audio and digital billboards.

Our software is designed to make our customers’ lives easier by enabling marketers and their advertising agencies to plan, buy and measure advertising campaigns in a highly automated fashion. We offer an easy-to-use self-service platform that provides customers with transparency and control over their advertising campaigns.

Our platform offers customers unique visibility across inventory, allowing them to create customized audience segments and leverage our people-based and strategic partner data to reach target audiences at scale. Our platform delivers a full suite of forecasting, reporting and built-in automation that provides our customers with insights into available inventory based on the desired target audience. We offer advanced forecasting and reporting that empowers our customers with functionality designed to ensure they can accurately measure and improve their return-on-advertising spend (“ROAS”) across channels.

Marketers use our software to deliver advertising campaigns to their desired target audience across channels and formats. Through platform integrations, we offer our customers access to omnichannel advertising inventory, which refers to media available across devices, channels and formats. This includes access to approximately 300 million unique desktop and mobile users, approximately 115 million connected TV households, approximately 112 million linear TV households, over 200 million unique digital audio users, and approximately 158,000 unique digital billboards in the United States. Our platform supports a full range of transaction types including real-time bidding, private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed, allowing customers to easily source and integrate ad inventory directly from publishers and private marketplaces.

We enable deep data access through our data integrations to authenticate user identities across a range of devices. Our matching of people-based identifiers enables us to be the nexus point with more than 70 data partners, providing customers with deep access to people-based data across market verticals such as automotive, entertainment, business to business, retail, consumer packaged goods, travel and tourism, and healthcare. Our proprietary identity graph has linked approximately 115 million households to an estimated 1 billion connected devices and is combined with access to approximately 280,000 audience attributes in the United States, which we believe makes it one of the largest in the industry.

Our customers are advertising buyers including large advertising holding companies, independent advertising agencies, mid-market advertising service organizations as well as marketers that rely on our self-service software

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platform for their programmatic ad buying needs. We are a trusted partner to our customers and have had a 95% customer satisfaction rating for the last four years based on Viant’s Annual Adelphic Customer Satisfaction Survey. Many of our customers use our software as their primary DSP.

Our platform is built on people-based data. Using our identity resolution capabilities and identity graph, marketers and their advertising agencies can identify targeted consumers using real-world identifiers rather than relying primarily on cookies to track users. We believe the industry is shifting to a people-based framework to replace cookies in delivering personalized advertising, particularly for identification. People-based data allows marketers to deliver personalized advertising while being able to accurately link ad impressions across multiple devices and to customer sales and measure the impact of their ad spend. In addition, people-based data allows consumers to know who is collecting their data and what it is being used for, and also gives them the right to delete or stop use of their data for personalized advertising. Many of our competitors rely on cookies for the targeting and measurement of digital advertising but this technology has not been effective at accurately measuring the real impact of a marketer’s ad spend on their business results. Apple’s popular web browser, Safari, currently does not allow third-party cookies and Google has announced plans to entirely disallow third-party cookies in their Chrome browser in 2023. This market change has created an increase in demand by marketers actively looking for platforms like ours that offer an alternative to cookie-based tracking, which we believe is strengthening our strategic position.

Programmatic advertising has proven its value to marketers and more organizations are devoting more of their digital ad spend to it. The digital ecosystem continues to evolve and with it programmatic advertising, creating new opportunities and needs for marketers and their agencies. The U.S. programmatic advertising market is expected to grow from $75.1 billion in 2020 to $142.0 billion in 2023, a 24% compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”), according to eMarketer, a market research company that provides insights and trends related to digital marketing, media and commerce. We focus on ad buyers and believe that our solutions will accelerate the shift of advertising budgets to programmatic advertising. Additionally, as marketers desire more control over programmatic advertising and move some functions of programmatic ad buying in-house, our software platform is designed to address these needs and expand our market opportunity.

Our total revenue was $224.1 million, $165.3 million and $164.9 million for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019, respectively, representing increases of 35.6% from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2021 and 0.2% from fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2020. We recorded net loss of $37.6 million and net income $20.6 million and adjusted EBITDA of $37.1 million and $31.8 million for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively, compared to net income of $9.9 million and adjusted EBITDA of $24.7 million for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019.

Adjusted EBITDA is a financial measure not presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America (“GAAP”). For a definition of adjusted EBITDA, an explanation of our management’s use of this measure and a reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to our net income or net loss, see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Key Operating and Financial Performance Measures—Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”

Our Industry

We believe the key industry trends shaping the advertising market include:

Advertising dollars shifting toward programmatic advertising: We believe the advertising industry is still in the early stages of a shift toward programmatic advertising. The ability to transact through real-time-bidding platforms has evolved beyond banner advertising to be used across a wide range of advertising channels and formats, including desktop, mobile, connected TV, linear TV, in-game, streaming audio and digital billboards. U.S. programmatic advertising is experiencing a rapid increase in adoption and, according to eMarketer, is expected to grow at a 24% CAGR from 2020 to 2023, reaching $123.2 billion in 2022 and $142.0 billion by 2023. U.S. programmatic advertising is forecasted to represent 39% of total U.S. media spend by 2023, increasing from 31% in 2020. The TV industry is undergoing significant disruptions as internet-enabled connected TV has become a preferred vehicle for streaming video content. The amount of connected TV users in the U.S. is forecasted to increase from approximately 209 million, or 63% of the U.S. population, in 2020 to approximately 236 million, or 68% of the U.S. population, in 2025, according to eMarketer. Connected TV also provides a number of benefits to

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advertisers, including more accurate control of scale, addressability and measurement. Marketers are increasingly investing in connected TV as more inventory becomes available. According to eMarketer, 54% of connected TV ad spend was transacted programmatically in 2019 and the share of programmatic is expected to increase to nearly 79% in 2023. In addition, connected TV ad spend is expected to grow from $9.0 billion in 2020 to $34.5 billion in 2025, a 31% CAGR.

Strong marketer demand for ROAS measurement across all channels: Marketers are looking for a centralized view of their customers, while connecting online and offline purchases to accurately measure ROAS. ROAS is a critical metric for marketing campaigns. Insights from ROAS across all campaigns inform marketers about what they are getting for their money across all media investments near real-time. Hence, marketers seek tools to track their ROAS across all channels. We believe people-based platforms are able to provide a more accurate measurement of ROAS as compared to cookie-based platforms.

Demand for scaled people-based platforms: Advertising has become more data driven and marketers need to be able to target audiences at the individual and household level while respecting consumer privacy. Internet advertisers in the past have capitalized on anonymous data from cookies to gain insights into users and ad performance. However, increased privacy concerns and changing requirements of browser providers including Google (Chrome) and Apple (Safari) are causing marketers to reduce their reliance on vendors and software platforms that primarily utilize cookies for device identification. In today’s connected world, marketers need to be able to identify their customers and connect with them across multiple channels, devices and formats. This is driving an industry shift away from cookie-based DSPs to scaled people-based DSPs.

Brands directly selecting advertising software solutions: Marketers are increasingly becoming directly involved in the selection of their advertising software solutions as they seek to reduce costs, better leverage their customer data and gain more control over their advertising. These factors have also led to an increase in marketers moving programmatic ad buying functions in-house. The automation of ad-buying technology has enabled fast, accurate and cost-effective decision-making, resulting in ad buying becoming a skillset that an increasing number of chief marketing officers want to fully own. According to the most recent survey by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry, in 2019, 18% of U.S. brands had completely moved programmatic ad buying in-house, and 51% of U.S. brands had moved a portion of their programmatic ad buying in-house.

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Our Market Opportunity

We believe that over the long term, our total addressable market is the total global advertising market which, eMarketer has forecasted to grow from $866 billion in 2022 to $1.09 trillion in 2025, an 8% CAGR. Currently, our focus is primarily on the U.S. market, which eMarketer has forecasted to grow from $309 billion in 2022 to $384 billion in 2025 in the United States, an 8% CAGR, broken into the following segments:

 

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Desktop and Mobile: U.S. desktop and mobile advertising are forecasted to grow from a $215 billion market in 2022 to a $273 billion market in 2025, an 8% CAGR.

 

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Connected TV: U.S. connected TV advertising is forecasted to be a $19 billion market in 2022 and forecasted to grow to $34 billion in 2025, a 22% CAGR. Connected TV includes over-the-top (“OTT”) content delivered through a connected device over the internet.

 

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Linear TV: U.S. linear TV advertising is forecasted to be a $67 billion market in 2022 and forecasted to be a $66 billion market in 2025, a negative 0.3% CAGR.

 

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Streaming Audio: U.S. digital audio advertising is forecasted to be a $6 billion market in 2022 and forecasted to grow to $8 billion in 2025, a 9% CAGR.

 

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Digital Billboards: U.S. billboard advertising is forecasted to be a $2 billion market in 2022 and forecasted to grow to $3 billion in 2025, a 7% CAGR.

The forecasts for each segment above include both programmatic and non-programmatic digital advertising. In recent years, programmatic advertising has represented an increasing portion of total U.S. media spend. eMarketer estimates that the U.S. programmatic advertising market, as represented by the segments above, will grow from $75 billion in 2020 to $142 billion in 2023, a 24% CAGR.

Our Solution

We make it easy to buy an ad anywhere, and help brands measure the impact of their ad spend by providing electronic buying and measurement of all advertising. Our software platform enables marketers and their advertising agencies to plan, buy and measure campaigns across channels. Integrated with our people-based capabilities, we provide our customers with a full suite of forecasting, reporting and automation functionality to make informed decisions around their advertising investments.  We provide superior customer service to ensure our customers have the level of support required for their unique business needs. Viant is driven to be a leader in innovation, automation, transparency, customer focus and responsible media.

Holistic, Omnichannel DSP: Marketers and their agencies can use our integrated software platform to efficiently manage omnichannel campaigns and access metrics from each channel to inform decisions in other channels. Our integrations enable the purchase of advertising media across desktop, mobile, connected TV, linear TV, in-game, streaming audio and digital billboards. Our technology leverages artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning to identify the best supply partners, formats and impressions based on our customers’ goals.

Viant Household ID™ (“VHHID”): Our proprietary people-based, household profile, which provides known household insights for optimized bid decisions and touchpoint collection across consumer pathways, offers holistic targeting and measurement across channels.  Our omnichannel DSP has exclusive access to the VHHID, providing a major differentiator for our DSP technology in today’s cookieless world.

World Without Cookies Software Release/People-Based Advertising: Released in 2021, our World Without Cookies software integrates a people-based, household approach directly into the Adelphic® DSP. By unifying the Viant Household ID™ throughout Adelphic, World Without Cookies empowers marketers to manage reach and frequency at the household level, reducing waste and improving the customer experience. In a recent study, marketers using our World Without Cookies software saw over 200% more conversions and reached 40% more households compared to traditional cookie-based platforms, and decreased frequency by 28%.

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Viant Identity Graph: Our proprietary, established identity resolution capabilities powers our identity graph, which reduces or eliminates the need for cookies by enabling matching of people-based identifiers that anchor digital identifiers and allow marketers to reach targeted consumers in a privacy-conscious manner, irrespective of device or channel. Our proprietary identity graph has linked approximately 115 million U.S. households to approximately 1 billion connected devices. This process provides access to an estimated 280,000 audience attributes using our proprietary people-based, household profile, the VHHID, allowing marketers to reach real consumers, not proxies, whether they are at home or away. The VHHID provides known insights for optimized bid decisions and touchpoint collection across consumer pathways for holistic targeting and measurement across channels. 

Advanced Reporting and Measurement: We invest heavily in our measurement capabilities, as we believe advertising should be driving a positive return. Our software and self-service data lake empower customers with differentiated insights, including conversion lift, multi-touch attribution, foot-traffic data reports, digital-out-of-home lift, sales reporting and ROAS analytics. Leveraging our people-based framework and machine learning algorithms, our platform provides marketers real-time actionable insights throughout an advertising campaign. Our built-in automation enables marketers to optimize digital campaigns designed to achieve their key performance indicator(“KPI”) goals.

Onboarding: We enable marketers to safely and securely onboard their first-party data to gain a view into their customers’ top attributes, create targeting segments and easily activate and measure these customer segments. Our simple interface allows marketers to upload audience data with ease and create a unique segment or build lookalike audiences without the need for a separate data management platform. Our data integrations provide marketers with high match rates, which provides scalable and meaningful audience insights for segmentation, targeting and measuring key outcomes both online and offline.

Flexible Customer Engagement Models: Our software is available through several levels of best-in-class customer service, from a self-service interface, providing customers with transparency and control over their advertising campaigns and underlying data infrastructure to a fully managed end-to-end solution, providing an experienced support team for audiences, execution and advanced reporting.

Our Strengths

We believe the following attributes and capabilities provide us with long-term competitive advantages:

 

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Scalable Self-Service Platform: We offer a self-service platform that enables customers to operate their ad campaigns without extensive involvement of our staff. This dynamic allows us to add new customers and allows customers to scale their spend on our platform in a manner that grows our revenue faster than the growth of our personnel costs.

 

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Centralized Platform: We believe our software platform enables our customers to plan, buy and measure advertising across more channels than our competitors and to centralize the purchase of each type of programmatic media on a single platform. Our supply integrations provide customers with access to approximately 300 million unique desktop and mobile users, approximately 115 million connected TV households, 112 million linear TV households, over 200 million unique digital audio users, and approximately 158,000 unique digital billboards, in the United States.

 

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Proprietary Technology: We leverage a robust suite of proprietary tools and products in order to enable our customers to utilize our platform and services. We are constantly iterating and developing new tools and products while utilizing our patented technologies and processes. As of December 31, 2021, we held 28 issued patents and 13 additional pending patent applications, which cover many of our proprietary products. As new offerings are developed, we continue to file and obtain patents on the most valuable and innovative products developed at our company.

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Machine Learning Capabilities: We enable the use of machine learning, workflow automation, automated reporting and other functionalities that allow our customers to update and make thousands of changes automatically to help achieve their desired business outcomes. We believe these capabilities make our customers’ lives easier and improve the performance of their campaigns.

 

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Advanced Reporting and Measurement: We invest heavily in our measurement capabilities, as we believe this will increase our customers’ usage of our software. Our platform measures ROAS across all channels and empowers our customers with real-time insights leveraging people-based data, including foot-traffic reports and multi-touch attribution analytics. Our advanced reporting functionality uses our identity graph that has linked approximately 115 million households to an estimated 1 billion connected devices and is combined with access to approximately 280,000 audience attributes in the United States to provide marketers with a holistic view of measurement across all channels.

 

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Differentiated People-Based Capabilities: Our software is built on a people-based framework. We integrate with over 70 data partners using people-based identifiers. We believe this allows for a much more effective and privacy-friendly approach to advertising than using cookies for identification. Our platform is built on a foundation of user consent with advanced consumer opt-out capabilities to keep privacy and security on the forefront.

 

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Experienced Management Team: Our management team has deep and extensive experience in the advertising technology sector, which we believe provides us with a competitive advantage. This experience of our management team has allowed us to continue to be innovative in developing solutions for our customers.

 

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Profitable Business Model: Because we are a self-service platform, as we add new customers and as customers increase the use of our software, we are able to demonstrate strong operating leverage. During the fiscal years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, our revenue was $224.1 million and $165.3 million, respectively. Our net loss was $37.6 million and our net income was $20.6 million during the fiscal years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Our adjusted EBITDA was $37.1 million and $31.8 million during the fiscal years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively.

Our Growth Strategy

We believe that the advertising market is in the early stages of a shift toward programmatic advertising. We intend to capitalize on this opportunity by pursuing the following strategies:

 

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Continue to invest in our customers’ success: Our platform provides extensive functionality designed to provide our customers with a high level of control and enable them to run efficient ad campaigns. We continue to enhance new customer onboarding and support while investing in training and education for customers to maximize their success with the platform.

 

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Add new customers and increase our customers’ usage of our platform: We continue to add functionality to our platform to attract new customers and encourage our customers to increase their usage of our platform. We believe many advertisers are in the early stages of moving a greater percentage of their advertising budgets to programmatic channels. By providing solutions for the planning, buying and measuring of their media spend across all channels, we believe we are well positioned to capture the increase in programmatic budgets from new and existing customers.

 

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Continue to strengthen our omnichannel partnerships: We believe we have the largest breadth of advertising inventory across channels in our industry landscape. We will continue to invest in the integration of new supply partners across all channels, further broadening and deepening our supply of advertising inventory.

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Expand our sales and marketing investment: We intend to continue to expand sales and marketing efforts to increase awareness and consideration of our platform and promote the advantages of our people-based framework as cookie-based options continue to decline.

 

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Extend our leadership position in people-based advertising: We believe there is significant value in continuing to invest in enhancing our identity resolution capabilities through additional people-based data integrations.

 

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Invest in growth through acquisitions: We also intend to invest in acquisitions that will allow us to offer new products and capitalize on our large and growing market opportunity. To the extent we find attractive acquisition candidates and business opportunities in the future, we may continue to acquire complementary businesses, products and technologies.

Our Platform

Viant’s DSP, Adelphic®, enables a marketer or their agency to programmatically buy an ad in linear television, a digital billboard on the side of the highway, a streaming ad on connected TVs, an ad in a mobile application, creatively within gameplay, during a podcast, or a dynamically personalized ad on any website, all within a single user interface. As illustrated by the graphic above, we believe that our software sits at the center of the digital advertising ecosystem.

The key components of our platform include:

 

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Interoperable DSP: Our holistic, omnichannel DSP enables brands and agencies to seamlessly target and measure key audiences across leading supply from premium publishers within CTV, digital out-of-home, mobile, audio, in-game, desktop and more without having to constantly switch between platforms.

 

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Comprehensive Forecasting. Our platform allows customers to plan future marketing campaigns based on desired targeting tactics by utilizing historical bid request data to project performance onto available inventory. Customers can easily apply multiple data segmentation filters and see what ad inventory is available and at what price.

 

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Ease of Use. Our intuitive user interface enables marketers to seamlessly move from forecasting to launching live advertising campaigns. This reduces the time from planning a campaign to execution,

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helping marketers to fluidly execute deterministic cross-channel campaigns using a variety of quality data and supply partners to reach their target audience.

 

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Campaign Decisioning. We offer the ability to continuously measure and optimize campaigns by leveraging powerful KPIs directly within platform reports. Marketers have the ability to optimize campaigns in-flight, even if they have already started. This granular decision-making ability provides customers more accurate and real-time understanding over the performance of their live campaigns.

Viant Household ID: Adelphic software has exclusive access to the VHHID, making it a people-based DSP, already operating in cookieless environments including CTV and mobile apps. The VHHID powers data, channel and publisher interoperability providing simple and effective advertising. Marketers can easily sync customer data, build custom audiences, extend target audiences and understand audience insights seamlessly within our software.

 

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Cookieless Solution. The VHHID provides marketers the scalability, addressability, measurability and privacy compliance necessary for success today. This patented technology unlocks many benefits such as:

 

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built-in cross-device conversion tracking, allowing marketers to target all eligible devices in a household to drive conversions;

 

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universal frequency management at scale, eliminating the need to control frequency in silos based on channel and/or device limitations; and

 

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tracking uniformity and identity persistence across all browsers and tracking environments with otherwise fragmented identifiers.

 

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Onboarding. Through our simple interface, marketers can safely and securely upload and leverage their first-party data using the VHHID. This enables marketers to onboard their first-party data and instantly gain a view into their customers’ top attributes, create targeting segments and easily activate and measure these customer segments across cookieless environments.

 

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Lookalike Modeling. We help expand the reach of an existing audience segment or prospect list for new customers for extended scale of critical audiences.

 

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People-Based Targeting and Data Integrations. Viant’s people-based approach allows brands to connect with real households and individuals with accurate reach and frequency. Our integrations with more than 70 data providers allow for extensive identity mapping, giving users the ability to target consumers based on purchase behaviors, location, TV viewership insights and much more. Superior integrations with TV viewership data providers present users with one of the most established, scalable and accurate CTV footprints in the market.

 

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Privacy and Security. We believe in giving consumers more transparency, choice and control over how their data is used in digital advertising. We support most advanced hashing protocols and make data protection a top priority for consumers and customers.

Advanced Reporting: We close the loop on digital and traditional media by linking advertising spend to online and offline sales.

 

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Reach and Frequency. Our platform accurately measures how many households and unique users an advertising campaign reached and the frequency of exposures.

 

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Cross-Channel Reporting. Our cross-channel reporting capabilities equip customers to analyze cross-device and cross-channel campaign impact on sales and other KPIs.

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TV vs Digital reporting provides insights into the impact connected and linear television advertising has on driving digital engagement like website visits or conversions, as well as offline sales. These insights create better visibility into the true ROAS of TV ad campaigns.

 

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Multi-Touch Attribution gives customers the ability to receive insights into where target audiences are interacting with brands, the impact of touchpoints across channels and devices and the order of steps along the conversion journey. The resulting holistic view of ad performance enables customers to close the loop on measurement and better link spend to sales.

 

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Conversion Lift Reporting helps advertisers understand the impact of media in driving conversions. Ghost bids are a control group made up of consumers who were within the campaign targeting criteria and active on the programmatic network, on whom a bid request was placed to show them the campaign ad, but the bid was lost. Those impressions are then passively tracked and included in the control group. By leveraging ghost bids to create a control group, customers can see how much impact their media has in driving incremental conversions and use these insights to refine their optimization strategy for better results and investment impact.

 

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Foot Traffic Attribution. Our foot traffic data reporting capabilities allow customers to analyze the impact of their ad campaigns on driving visits to a physical location.

 

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Digital Billboard Reporting. Our digital billboard reporting provides a holistic view of ad spend, giving customers real-time insights into their digital billboard ad performance and helping customers optimize budgets by allocating ad spend on effective digital billboards and venue types.

Our software is built with ad buyers in mind and offers many in-depth features that give buyers the highest levels of control, which helps ensure they are running the most efficient campaigns possible. This includes:

 

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Bulk Functionality: Our platform is built to ease the lives of programmatic traders. With Adelphic, traders can mass edit ad orders and campaigns, instead of making individual changes one at a time, saving significant time. For example, if a trader wants to change the bid price for all 1,000 of their ad orders, they could simply download a form and upload it, rather than wasting time by editing each ad order one by one.

 

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Application Integration Interfaces (“API”) Capabilities: Adelphic provides ease of integration using APIs and tools. The API capabilities provide bilateral data syndication into or out of the platform for trafficking and reporting in formats easily accepted by business intelligence teams for programmatic traders. With these, traders can maintain customer identities with a fully integrated platform that links devices and offline activities to real people and seamlessly execute and measure campaigns.

 

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Machine Learning Algorithms: Our built-in advanced machine learning technology analyzes millions of impressions and data points every second. Our algorithms find optimal bid prices for maximizing performance and scale across all major KPIs, allowing our customers to strengthen their campaign efforts and build confidence in programmatic campaign performance.

Our Technology and Development

Rapid and continuing innovation is a core driver of our business success and our corporate culture. Our product and engineering team is responsible for the design, development and testing of our platform. We are committed to continuous innovation and rapid introduction of new technologies, features and functionality that bring value to our customers. We expect technology and development expense and capitalized software development costs to increase as we continue to invest in the development of our platform to support additional features and functions, such as enhancement of our user interface and automation functions, and to increase the number of advertising and data inventory integrations in various channels.

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The technical infrastructure for our platform is currently managed through third-party web hosting services providers and to a limited extent, our own servers which are located at a third-party data center facility. We generally enter into one- to two-year agreements with our web hosting providers.

Our Customers

Our customers consist of purchasers of programmatic advertising inventory. We define an active customer as a customer that had total aggregate contribution ex-TAC of at least $5,000 through our platform during the previous twelve months. We had 309 and 264 active customers for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively, in each case consisting of advertising buyers, including large advertising holding companies, independent advertising agencies, mid-market advertising service organizations as well as marketers relying on our self-service software platform for their programmatic ad buying needs. For a detailed discussion of active customers, see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operation—Key Operating and Financial Performance Measures—Active Customers and Average Contribution ex-TAC per Active Customer.” Contribution ex-TAC is a non-GAAP financial measure. For a detailed discussion of our key operating and financial performance measures and a reconciliation of contribution ex-TAC to the most directly comparable financial measure calculated in accordance with GAAP, see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operation—Key Operating and Financial Performance Measures—Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”

Many of the advertising agencies that we work with are owned by holding companies, where decision-making is generally highly decentralized such that purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with advertisers are located, at the agency, local branch or division level. Our customer count includes only those parties with which we have a billing relationship. We contract with our customers either through master service agreements or insertion orders. Our agreements do not contain any material commitments on behalf of customers to use our platform to purchase ad inventory or use other features. Our agreements with customers generally do not have a specified term, and are generally terminable at any time by either party upon specified notice periods, typically ranging from 30 to 90 days. Insertion orders are generally limited in scope and can be reduced or canceled by a buyer without penalty. See “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Business and Operations—We receive a significant amount of revenue from a select number of advertising agency holding companies, owning various advertising agencies, and the loss of advertising agencies as customers could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.” for additional discussion of our customer relationships with advertising agencies.

Our Advertising and Data Supply

We obtain digital advertising inventory primarily through our integrations with supply side platforms (“SSPs”) and directly with publishers. We believe that our integrations across every channel give us the most robust omnichannel integrations of any single platform. These suppliers provide us with access to a breadth of programmatic advertising inventory across desktop, mobile, connected TV, linear TV, in-game, streaming audio and digital billboards.

We enable deep data access through our integrations with over 70 leading data companies, giving our customers access to data across key industry verticals, including auto, retail, consumer packaged goods, travel and health. Customers onboard their own first-party data onto our platform, without the need of a separate data management platform. Our operation of Myspace.com provides certain data assets and intellectual property that we may leverage to continue to offer innovative products and services to our clients.

Sales and Marketing

We sell our platform through a direct sales team focused on business development across all markets, including sales to new customers and revenue growth within existing customers. We have an experienced sales team focused on selling access to our platform in our target markets, building and nurturing relationships with global brands and agencies. We use a consultative sales approach focused on educating existing and potential customers on our platform capabilities, and training clients to use our platform. We offer a formal certification program, Programmatic University and Adelphic Certification, which covers programmatic industry trends, technology capabilities and time-saving workflows and have an online knowledge base with robust documentation. We provide

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dedicated customer support and work with customers as they set up and optimize their campaigns, assist with delivery against KPIs and goals, and provide post-campaign support and recommendations.

We tailor our contracts and terms to the needs of our customers, including by offering our three different pricing options: a percentage of spend option, a subscription option and a fixed cost per mille (“CPM”) option. Customers can use our platform on a self-service basis or can enlist our services to execute their campaigns.

Our marketing efforts are focused on increasing awareness and consideration for our brands, executing thought-leadership initiatives, participating in industry events, creating comprehensive sales support materials and generating new customer leads. We seek to accomplish these objectives by presenting at industry conferences, hosting customer conferences, publishing white papers and research, public relations activities, advertising campaigns and social media presence.

Privacy and Data Protection

In the ordinary course of our business, we may collect, receive, compile, use, store, process, share, dispose of, disclose, retain, transfer, and destroy (“Process”) personal information. Accordingly, we are subject to numerous data privacy and security obligations, including federal, state, local, and foreign laws, regulations, guidance, and industry standards related to data privacy, security, and protection. Such obligations may include, without limitation, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“EU GDPR”), the EU GDPR as it forms part of United Kingdom (“UK”) law by virtue of section 3 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (“UK GDPR”), the ePrivacy Directive, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS”). In addition, many U.S. states have enacted or proposed data privacy laws. For example, Virginia passed the Consumer Data Protection Act, and Colorado passed the Colorado Privacy Act.

The CCPA and EU GDPR are examples of the increasingly stringent and evolving regulatory frameworks related to personal information Processing that may increase our compliance obligations and exposure for any noncompliance. For example, the CCPA imposes obligations on covered businesses to provide specific disclosures related to a business’s Processing of personal information and to respond to certain requests from California residents related to their personal information (for example, requests to know of the business’s personal information Processing activities, to delete the individual’s personal information, and to opt out of certain personal information disclosures). Also, the CCPA provides for civil penalties and a private right of action for data breaches which may include an award of statutory damages. In addition, it is anticipated that the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (“CPRA”), effective January 1, 2023, will expand the CCPA. The CPRA will, among other things, give California residents the ability to limit use of certain sensitive personal information, establish restrictions on personal information retention, expand the types of data breaches that are subject to the CCPA’s private right of action, and establish a new California Privacy Protection Agency to implement and enforce the new law. U.S. federal and state consumer protection laws may also require us to publish statements that accurately and fairly describe how we handle personal information and choices individuals may have about the way we handle their personal information.

Foreign data privacy and security laws impose significant and complex compliance obligations on entities that are subject to those laws. For example, the EU GDPR applies to any company established in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) and to companies established outside the EEA that Process personal information in connection with the offering of goods or services to data subjects in the EEA or the monitoring of the behavior of data subjects in the EEA. These obligations may include limiting personal information Processing to only what is necessary for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes; requiring a legal basis for personal information Processing; requiring the appointment of a data protection officer in certain circumstances; increasing transparency obligations to data subjects; requiring data protection impact assessments in certain circumstances; limiting the collection and retention of personal information; increasing rights for data subjects; formalizing a heightened and codified standard of data subject consents; requiring the implementation and maintenance of technical and organizational safeguards for personal information; mandating notice of certain personal information breaches to the relevant supervisory authority(ies) and affected individuals; and mandating the appointment of representatives in the UK and/or the EU in certain circumstances.

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See “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Data Privacy—We are subject to stringent and changing obligations related to data privacy and security. Our actual or perceived failure to comply with such obligations could lead to regulatory investigations or actions, litigation, fines and penalties, disruptions of our business operations, reputational harm, loss of customers or sales, revenue declines, increase the cost of data, reduce the availability of data, adversely affect the demand for our products and services, or other adverse business consequences.” for additional information about the laws and regulations to which we are subject and about the risks to our business associated with such laws and regulations.

Competition

Our industry is highly competitive and fragmented. We compete with smaller, privately-held companies, along with public companies such as the Trade Desk, and with divisions of large, well-established companies such as Google and Amazon. The competitive landscape in recent years has been affected by consolidation and limited investment in new startups in our industry and there are few competitors with self-service capabilities. Our long history and time in the market with customers has given us significant advantages in terms of platform development and expertise, as well as a long development lead ahead of new entrants. We believe that we compete primarily based on the performance of campaigns running on our platform, capabilities of our platform, our identity resolution capabilities, our omnichannel capabilities and our advance reporting capabilities. We believe that we are differentiated from our competitors in the following areas:

 

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we are an independent technology company focused on serving advertising agencies and marketers on the buy-side of our industry;

 

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our platform is self-service and easy to use;

 

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we offer our DSP in an integrated manner with our people-based capabilities, so customers do not need to use separate providers for onboarding client information and ad and data purchasing services;

 

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our platform provides comprehensive access to a wide range of inventory types across a broad range of channels;

 

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our platform provides comprehensive access to a wide range of data partners across a broad range of industry verticals and channels to enable precise audience targeting and measurement;

 

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our identity resolution capabilities help marketers plan, buy and measure their campaigns more effectively;

 

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we provide extensive customer service and satisfaction; and

 

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we provide flexible pricing options to support our customer’s needs.

Our Human Capital

We are a founder-led business and believe our employees and culture are key to our success. Our business and our culture are anchored on four core values that embody our resourceful mentality: “Live,” “Lead,” “Create” and “Figure It Out.” We believe we attract talented employees to our company and sophisticated customers to our platform in large part because of our vision and unwavering commitment to using cutting-edge technologies to create products that help advance the advertising industry.

As of December 31, 2021, we had approximately 350 employees in 10 offices across the United States. Our team draws from a broad spectrum of backgrounds and experiences across technology and advertising industries.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion where all employees feel valued and included. We believe our greatest asset is the people who work for us, and as part of our investment in our people, we prioritize

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diversity and inclusion. Our goal is to create a culture where we value, respect, and provide fair treatment and opportunities for all employees. Each year, we conduct an annual survey to give employees the opportunity to provide feedback on our management team and culture. This survey helps drive new programs that continue the development of our inclusive culture. Our leaders review the survey feedback and work with their teams to initiate new initiatives based on the results.

We are committed to developing a diverse environment through recruiting, development programs, community involvement and fostering conversations about differences.  

Talent Development

Even though we have been around for over 20 years, our culture still reflects an entrepreneurial spirit. We empower employees to develop their skills and abilities by following our core values and acting on great ideas regardless of their role or function. We encourage employees at all levels to be creative and come up with ideas that can help the business grow. We work to provide an environment where talented individuals and teams can take control of their career growth. We provide a wide range of learning and development opportunities in both individual and group settings.

Compensation and Benefits

We provide compensation and benefits programs to help meet the needs of our employees and reward their efforts and contributions. We use internal and external resources to help develop plans that are fair and reward our employees’ commitment and performance with the goal of attracting and retaining high performing individuals.

In addition to salaries, we provide competitive compensation programs that are in line with our peers and industry. These programs may include bonuses, equity awards, 401(k) plan, healthcare and insurance benefits, flexible spending accounts, paid time off, family leave and employee assistance programs among many others.

Health, Safety and Wellness

We strive to provide a work environment where our employees feel safe and are comfortable working. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we immediately implemented a teleworking program that complied with all applicable government regulations and protected our employees while allowing them to continue to be effective in their jobs. We continue to stay updated on changes in government regulations and implement them to meet our employees’ changing health and wellness needs.

Intellectual Property

The protection of our technology and intellectual property is an important component of our success. We rely on intellectual property laws, including trade secret, copyright, patent and trademark laws in the United States and abroad, and use contracts, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements, employee disclosure and invention assignment agreements and other contractual rights to protect our intellectual property.

As of December 31, 2021, we held 28 issued patents, 13 pending patent applications and 323 issued trademarks. Our issued patents are scheduled to expire between 2025 and 2038. We continually review our development efforts to assess the existence and patentability of new intellectual property. In addition to the intellectual property relating to the operation of Adelphic and our people-based framework, we own intellectual property related to our owned site, Myspace.com. Of our issued patents, 13 relate to our platform and our people-based framework, and 15 relate to Myspace.com.

Corporate Information

We were founded in 1999 by Tim, Chris and Russ Vanderhook who continue to lead our company today. We have been at the forefront of digital advertising technology since our inception and have demonstrated our ability to grow, thrive, and innovate as competitors have come and gone. In 2011, we acquired the social network website Myspace.com. In 2011, Tim and Chris Vanderhook started Xumo, a connected TV streaming service, which was acquired by Comcast Corp. in 2020. In 2015, we completed our first people-based integration. We remained independent until 2016, when Time Inc. acquired a 60% interest in our company through our subsidiary, Viant Technology Holding Inc. (the “Former Holdco”). That interest was later acquired by Meredith Corporation when it

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acquired Time Inc. in 2018. In 2017, we purchased Adelphic, a DSP. Since the Adelphic acquisition, we have materially transformed from a full-service provider of digital advertising solutions into a leading DSP that enables marketers and their advertising agencies to centralize the planning, buying and measurement of their media investments using a people-based framework. We have grown from a business operating from a home office to a company with approximately 350 employees in 10 offices throughout the United States at the end of 2021. In 2019, we entered into an agreement that resulted in the retirement of the Former Holdco’s interest in our company and Tim Vanderhook, Chris Vanderhook and Four Brothers 2 LLC (the “Vanderhook Parties”) acquired that 60% interest in our company (the “2019 Former Holdco transaction”), allowing it to once again become an independent company. Viant Technology Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on October 9, 2020. In connection with the consummation of our initial public offering (the “IPO”), we became the sole managing member of Viant Technology LLC. We completed the IPO of our Class A common stock on February 12, 2021. Our principal executive offices are located at 2722 Michelson Drive, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92612 and our telephone number is (949) 861-8888. Our website address is www.viantinc.com. Our design logo, “Viant,” and our other registered and common law trade names, trademarks and service marks are the property of Viant Technology Inc.

The SEC maintains a website at www.sec.gov that contains reports, information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. Our Annual Report can be downloaded from the SEC’s website. We will file with or furnish to the SEC periodic reports and other information. We furnish or make available to our stockholders annual reports containing our audited consolidated financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP. We also furnish or make available to our stockholders quarterly reports containing our unaudited interim financial information, for the first three fiscal quarters of each fiscal year. We make our periodic reports and other information filed with or furnished to the SEC pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act, available, free of charge, through our website, www.viantinc.com, as soon as reasonably practicable after those reports and other information are electronically filed with or furnished to the SEC. Information contained on our website or linked therein or otherwise connected thereto does not constitute part of nor is it incorporated by reference into this Annual Report.

Emerging Growth Company

We are an “emerging growth company” as defined in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012 (“JOBS Act”). We may take advantage of certain exemptions from various public company reporting requirements, including not being required to have our internal control over financial reporting audited by our independent registered public accounting firm under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (the “Sarbanes-Oxley Act”), reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements, and exemptions from the requirements of holding a nonbinding advisory vote on executive compensation and any golden parachute payments. We may take advantage of these exemptions until December 31, 2026 or until we are no longer an “emerging growth company,” whichever is earlier. We will cease to be an emerging growth company prior to the end of such period if certain earlier events occur, including if we become a “large accelerated filer” as defined in Rule 12b-2 under the Exchange Act, our annual gross revenues exceed $1.07 billion or we issue more than $1.0 billion of non-convertible debt in any three-year period.

In addition, the JOBS Act provides that an emerging growth company may take advantage of an extended transition period for complying with new or revised accounting standards. This provision allows an emerging growth company to delay the adoption of accounting standards until those standards would otherwise apply to private companies. We have elected to take advantage of this extended transition period, and as a result, we will comply with new or revised accounting standards on the relevant dates on which adoption is required for private companies. As part of this election, we are delaying the adoption of accounting guidance related to leases and implementation costs incurred in cloud computing arrangements that currently applies to public companies. See Note 2 to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report for additional information.

 

   

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Item 1A. Risk Factors.

Investing in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the following risks and uncertainties described below, together with all other information contained in this Annual Report and in our other public filings, including our consolidated financial statements and the related notes appearing at the end of this Annual Report. The occurrence of any of the following risks, as well as any risks or uncertainties not currently known to us or that we currently do not believe to be material, could materially and adversely affect our business, prospects, financial condition, results of operations and cash flow, in which case, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline and you could lose all or part of your investment.

Risks Related to Our Business and Operations

Our success and revenue growth are dependent on adding new customers, effectively educating and training our existing customers on how to make full use of our platform and increasing usage of our platform by our customers.

Our success is dependent on regularly adding new customers and increasing our customers’ usage of our platform. Our contracts and relationships with customers generally do not include long-term or exclusive obligations requiring them to use our platform or maintain or increase their use of our platform. Our customers typically have relationships with numerous providers and can use both our platform and those of our competitors without incurring significant costs or disruption. Our customers may also choose to decrease their overall advertising spend for any reason, including if they do not believe they are receiving a sufficient ROAS. Accordingly, we must continually work to win new customers and retain existing customers, increase their usage of our platform and capture a larger share of their advertising spend. For those customers utilizing our self-service capabilities, we may not be successful at educating and training customers, particularly our newer customers, on how to use our platform, in particular our advanced reporting tools, in order for our customers to get the most benefit from our platform and increase their usage. If these efforts are unsuccessful or customers decide not to continue to maintain or increase their usage of our platform for any other reason, or if we fail to attract new customers, our revenue could fail to grow or decline, which would materially and adversely harm our business, operating results and financial condition. We cannot assure you that our customers will continue to use and increase their spend on our platform or that we will be able to attract a sufficient number of new customers to continue to grow our business and revenue. If customers representing a significant portion of our business decide to materially reduce their use of our platform or cease using our platform altogether, our revenue could be significantly reduced, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition. We may not be able to replace customers who decrease or cease their usage of our platform with new customers that will use our platform to the same extent or at all.

We may not realize the expected benefits of an industry shift away from cookie-based consumer tracking as such shift may not occur as rapidly as we expect or may not be realized at all.

We expect to benefit as compared to others in our industry from marketers reducing their reliance on vendors and software platforms that utilize third-party cookies for tracking. However, we cannot assure you that the shift away from cookie-based consumer tracking will happen as rapidly as we expect or that such shift will occur at all. For example, in June 2021, Google announced that its previously announced timeline of blocking third-party cookies by 2022 would be delayed until 2023. Additionally, even if the shift away from cookie-based consumer tracking does occur, we may not be as successful in growing our business and increasing our revenue as we expect. For example, marketers may not shift their business away from our competitors if our competitors are successful in developing alternative products or services that are not significantly reliant on the cookie-based framework, which could harm our business.

The effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other adverse market events have had, and could in the future have, an adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition.

Our business and operations have been and could in the future be adversely affected by health epidemics, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to control its spread have curtailed the movement of people, goods and services worldwide, including in the regions in which we and our customers and partners operate, and are significantly impacting economic activity and financial markets. Many marketers,

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particularly those in the travel, retail and automotive industries, have decreased or paused their advertising spending as a response to the economic uncertainty, decline in business activity, and other COVID-19-related impacts, which has negatively impacted, and may continue to negatively impact, our revenue and results of operations, the extent and duration of which we may not be able to accurately predict. The spread of an infectious disease may also result in, and, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in, regional quarantines, labor shortages or stoppages, changes in consumer purchasing patterns, disruptions to service providers’ ability to deliver data on a timely basis, or at all, and overall economic instability.

A recession, depression or other adverse market events resulting from the spread of COVID-19 could materially and adversely affect our business and that of our customers or potential customers. Our customers’ and potential customers’ businesses or cash flows have been and may continue to be negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led and may continue to lead them to reduce their advertising spending and delay their advertising initiatives or technology spending, or attempt to renegotiate contracts and obtain concessions, which may materially and negatively impact our business, operating results and financial condition. Our customers may also seek adjustments to their payment terms, delay making payments or default on their payables, any of which may impact the timely receipt and/or collectability of our receivables. Typically, we are contractually required to pay advertising inventory and data suppliers within a negotiated period of time, regardless of whether our customers pay us on time, or at all, and we may not be able to renegotiate better terms. As a result, our financial condition and results of operations may be adversely impacted if the business or financial condition of our customers and marketers is negatively affected by the pandemic.

Our operations are subject to a range of external factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic that are not within our control. We have taken precautionary measures intended to minimize the risk of the spread of the virus to our employees, partners and customers, and the communities in which we operate. There can be no assurance that precautionary measures, whether adopted by us or imposed by others, will be effective, and such measures could negatively affect our sales, marketing, and customer service efforts, delay and lengthen our sales cycles, decrease our employees’ or customers’ or partners’ productivity, or create operational or other challenges, any of which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

The economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the recent surge caused by variants of the virus, has made and may continue to make it difficult for us to forecast revenue and operating results and to make decisions regarding operational cost structures and investments. Our business depends on the overall demand for advertising and on the economic health of our customers that benefit from our platform. Economic downturns or unstable market conditions may cause our customers to decrease their advertising budgets, which could reduce usage of our platform and adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition. We have committed, and we plan to continue to commit, resources to grow our business, including to expand our employee base and further develop our platform and systems, and such investments may not yield anticipated returns, particularly if worldwide business activity continues to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The duration and extent of the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic depend on future developments that cannot be accurately predicted at this time, and if we are not able to respond to and manage the impact of such events effectively, our business may be harmed. Such future developments may include, among others, the duration and spread of the outbreak, emerging variant strains of the virus with varying degrees of vaccine resistance, new information that may emerge concerning the severity of COVID-19 and government actions to contain COVID-19 or treat its impact, the level of relief efforts designed to help businesses and consumers, including any declines in such levels, impact on our customers and our sales cycles, impact on our customer, industry or employee events, and effect on our advertising inventory partners.

Our results may also fluctuate unpredictably as and to the extent there is a recovery from the pandemic and a return to non-pandemic business conditions. We cannot predict the impact of a post-pandemic recovery on the economy, our customers or consumer media consumption patterns or the degree to which certain trends, such as the growth in demand for our connected TV offering, will continue.

If we fail to innovate and make the right investment decisions in our offerings and platform, we may not attract and retain customers and our revenue and results of operations may decline.

Our industry is subject to rapid and frequent changes in technology, evolving customer needs and the frequent introduction by our competitors of new and enhanced offerings. We must regularly make investment decisions regarding offerings and technology to maintain the technological competitiveness of our products and services and meet customer demand and evolving industry standards. The complexity and uncertainty regarding the development

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of new technologies and the extent and timing of market acceptance of innovative products and services create difficulties in maintaining this competitiveness. The success of any enhancement or new solution depends on many factors, including timely completion, adequate quality testing, appropriate introduction and market acceptance. Without the timely introduction of new products, services and enhancements, our offerings could become technologically or commercially obsolete over time, in which case our revenue and operating results would suffer. If new or existing competitors have more attractive offerings, we may lose customers or customers may decrease their use of our platform. New customer demands, superior competitive offerings or new industry standards could require us to make unanticipated and costly changes to our platform or business model.

If we fail to enhance our current products and services or fail to develop new products to adapt to our rapidly changing industry or to evolving customer needs, demand for our platform could decrease and our business, operating results and financial condition may be adversely affected.

The market for programmatic advertising is evolving. If this market develops slower or differently than we expect, our business, operating results and financial condition would be adversely affected.

We derive revenue from the programmatic purchase of advertising on our platform. We expect that programmatic ad buying will continue to be our primary source of revenue for the foreseeable future, and that our revenue growth will largely depend on increasing our customers’ usage of our platform. While the market for programmatic ad buying for desktop and mobile display ads is relatively established, the market in other channels is still emerging, and our current and potential customers may not shift quickly enough to programmatic ad buying from other buying methods, which could reduce our growth potential. If the market for programmatic ad buying deteriorates or develops more slowly than we expect, it could reduce demand for our platform, and our business, growth prospects and financial condition would be adversely affected.

In particular, the market for programmatic advertising across multiple advertising channels, including connected TV, linear TV, in-game, streaming audio and digital billboard channels is an emerging market. Our ability to provide capabilities across multiple advertising channels, which we refer to as omnichannel, may be constrained if we are not able to maintain or grow advertising inventory for such channels, and some of our omnichannel offerings may not gain market acceptance. We may not be able to accurately predict changes in overall industry demand for the channels in which we operate and cannot assure you that our investment in channel development will correspond to any such changes. For example, we cannot predict whether the growth in demand for our connected TV offering will continue. Furthermore, if our channel mix changes due to a shift in customer demand, such as customers shifting their usage more quickly or more extensively than expected to channels in which we have relatively less functionality, features, or inventory, such as linear TV, then demand for our platform could decrease, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.

We receive a significant amount of revenue from a select number of advertising agency holding companies, owning various advertising agencies, and the loss of advertising agencies as customers could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

A significant amount of our revenue comes from advertising agencies. We had 309 active customers for the year ended December 31, 2021, consisting primarily of advertising agencies. Many of these agencies are owned by advertising agency holding companies, where decision making is generally highly decentralized such that purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with marketers are located, at the agency, local branch or division level. If all of our individual customer contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, two advertising agency holding companies would represent 15.5% and 14.2%, respectively, of our revenue for 2021. Due to the highly decentralized operations and decision-making at the agencies owned by each of these advertising agency holding companies, we consider the individual agencies rather than the holding company to be our customers.

Often, we enter into separate contracts and billing relationships with the individual agencies and account for them as separate customers. However, some holding companies for these agencies may choose to exert control over the individual agencies in the future. If so, any loss of relationships with such holding companies and, consequently, of their agencies, local branches or divisions, as customers could significantly harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

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We do not have exclusive relationships with advertising agencies and we depend on agencies to work with us as they embark on advertising campaigns for their clients. The loss of such agencies could significantly harm our business, operating results and financial condition. If we fail to maintain satisfactory relationships with an advertising agency, we risk losing business from the marketers represented by that agency.

Marketers may change advertising agencies. If a marketer switches from an agency that utilizes our platform to one that does not, we could lose revenue from that marketer. In addition, some advertising agencies have strong relationships with competing DSPs or other platforms and may direct their marketers to such other platforms. If a significant number of marketers and their agencies begin to utilize competing platforms for the administration of their advertising campaigns, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.

We often have long sales cycles, which can result in significant time between initial contact with a prospect and execution of a customer agreement, making it difficult to project when, if at all, we will obtain new customers and when we will generate revenue from those customers.

Our sales cycle, from initial contact to contract execution and implementation, can take significant time. As part of our sales cycle, we may incur significant expenses before we generate any revenue from a prospective customer. We have no assurance that the substantial time and money spent on our sales efforts will generate significant revenue. If conditions in the marketplace, generally or with a specific prospective customer, change negatively, it is possible that we will be unable to recover any of these expenses. Our sales efforts involve educating our customers about the use, technical capabilities and benefits of our platform. Some of our customers undertake an evaluation process that frequently involves not only our platform but also the offerings of our competitors. As a result, it is difficult to predict when we will obtain new customers and begin generating revenue from these new customers. Even if our sales efforts result in obtaining a new customer, the customer controls when and to what extent it uses our platform and therefore the amount of revenue we generate, and it may not sufficiently justify the expenses incurred to acquire the customer and the related training support. As a result, we may not be able to add customers, or generate revenue, as quickly as we may expect, which could harm our growth prospects.

Customers have the option to use our platform on a self-service basis, which requires us to commit substantial time and expenses toward training potential customers on how to make full use of our platform. If we fail to offer sufficient customer training and support for our platform, we may not be able to attract new customers or maintain our current customers.

Because we operate a platform that has many powerful tools and that customers can choose to use on a self-service basis, we are often required to spend a substantial amount of time and effort educating and training current customers and potential customers on how to make full use of our platform. Because potential customers may already be trained to use our competitors’ platforms, we are also required to spend a significant amount of time cultivating relationships with those potential customers to ensure they understand the potential benefits of our platform and this relationship building process can take many months and may not result in us winning an opportunity with any given potential customer. As a result, customer training and support is critical for the successful and continued use of our platform and for maintaining and increasing spend through our platform from existing and new customers.

Providing this training and support requires that our platform operations personnel have specific domain knowledge and expertise, making it more difficult for us to hire qualified personnel and to scale up our support operations due to the extensive training required. The importance of high-quality customer service will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers. If we are not responsive and proactive regarding our customers’ advertising needs, or do not provide effective support for our customers’ advertising campaigns, our ability to retain our existing customers could suffer and our reputation with existing or potential customers could be harmed, which would negatively impact our business.

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We are subject to payment-related risks and if our customers do not pay, or dispute their invoices, our business, operating results and financial condition may be adversely affected.

Many of our contracts with advertising agencies provide that if the marketer does not pay the agency, the agency is not liable to us, and we must seek payment solely from the marketer, a type of arrangement called sequential liability. The credit risk associated with these arrangements may vary depending on the nature of an advertising agency’s aggregated marketer base and the credit risk of the agency itself. We may also be involved in disputes with agencies and their marketers over the operation of our platform, the terms of our agreements or our billings for purchases made by them through our platform. When we are unable to collect or make adjustments to our bills to customers, we incur write-offs for bad debt, which could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations for the periods in which the write-offs occur. In the future, bad debt may exceed reserves for such contingencies and our bad debt exposure may increase over time. Any increase in write-offs for bad debt could have a materially negative effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

Furthermore, we are generally contractually required to pay suppliers of advertising inventory and data within a negotiated period of time, regardless of whether our customers pay us on time, or at all. While we attempt to negotiate long payment periods with our suppliers and shorter periods from our customers, we are not always successful. As a result, our accounts payable are often due on shorter cycles than our accounts receivables, requiring us to remit payments from our own funds, and accept the risk of bad debt.

Due to this potential imbalance in our collections and payments, we may rely on our credit facility to partially or completely fund our working capital requirements. We cannot assure you that as we continue to grow, our business will generate sufficient cash flow from operations or that future borrowings will be available to us under the credit facility in an amount sufficient to fund our working capital needs. If our cash flows and credit facility borrowings are insufficient to fund our working capital requirements, we may not be able to grow at the rate we currently expect or at all. In addition, in the absence of sufficient cash flows from operations, we might be unable to meet our obligations under our credit facility and we may be at risk of default thereunder. We cannot assure you that we would be able to access additional financing or increase our borrowing or borrowing capacity under our current or any future credit facility on commercially reasonable terms or at all.

If our access to advertising inventory is diminished or fails to grow, our revenue could decline and our growth could be impeded.

We must maintain a consistent supply of ad inventory. Our success depends on our ability to secure inventory on reasonable terms across a broad range of advertising inventory partners in various verticals and formats. The amount, quality and cost of inventory available to us can change at any time. If our relationships with any of our significant suppliers were to cease, or if the material terms of these relationships were to change unfavorably, our business would be negatively impacted. Our suppliers are generally not bound by long-term contracts. As a result, there is no guarantee that we will have access to a consistent supply of inventory on favorable terms or at all. Inventory suppliers control the sales process for the inventory they supply, and their processes may not always work in our favor. For example, suppliers may place restrictions on the use of their inventory, including prohibiting the placement of advertisements on behalf of specific marketers.

As new types of inventory, such as digital advertising for television, become more readily available, we will need to expend significant resources to ensure we have access to such new inventory. Although television advertising is a large market, only a relatively small percentage of it is currently purchased programmatically. We are investing heavily in our programmatic television offering, including by increasing our workforce and by adding new features, functions and integrations to our platform. If the digital television advertising market does not grow as we anticipate or we fail to successfully serve such a market, our growth prospects could be harmed.

Our success depends on consistently adding valued inventory in a cost-effective manner. If we are unable to maintain a consistent supply of inventory for any reason, customer retention and loyalty, and our operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

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If our access to people-based data is diminished, the effectiveness of our platform would be decreased, which could harm our operating results and financial condition.

Much of the data that we use is obtained through integrations with third-party data suppliers. We are dependent upon our ability to obtain necessary data licenses on commercially reasonable terms. We could suffer material adverse consequences if we were unable to obtain data through our integrations with data suppliers. Our ability to serve particular customers is also enhanced when such customers upload their own first-party data. Our operation of our platform and access to data could be negatively affected if, due to legal, contractual, privacy, market optics, competition or other economic concerns, third parties cease entering into data integration agreements with us or customers cease uploading their data to our platform. Additionally, we could terminate relationships with our data suppliers if they fail to adhere to our data quality and privacy standards.

Furthermore, digital advertising and in-app advertising are largely dependent on established technology companies and their operation of the most commonly used internet browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari), devices and operating systems (Android and iOS). These companies may change the operations or policies of their browsers, devices and operating systems in a manner that fundamentally changes our ability to operate our platform or use or collect data. Users of these browsers, devices or operating systems may also adjust their behaviors and use of technology in ways that change our ability to collect data. Digital advertising and in-app advertising are also dependent, in part, on internet protocols and the practices of internet service providers, including IP address allocation. Changes that these providers make to their practices, or adoption of new internet protocols, may materially limit or alter the availability of data. A limitation or alteration of the availability of data in any of these or other instances may have a material impact on the advertising technology industry, which could decrease advertising budgets and subsequently reduce our revenue and adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.

If we were to lose access to significant amounts of the data that enables our people-based framework, our ability to provide products and services to our customers could be materially and adversely impacted, which could be materially adverse to our business, operating results and financial condition.

If we do not effectively grow and train our sales and support teams, we may be unable to add new customers or increase usage of our platform by our existing customers and our business will be adversely affected.

We are substantially dependent on our sales and support teams to obtain new customers and to increase usage of our platform by our existing customers. We believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, integrating and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth. Due to the complexity of our platform, a significant time lag exists between the hiring date of sales and support personnel and the time when they become fully productive. Our recent and planned hires may not become productive as quickly as we expect, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. If we are unable to hire and train sufficient numbers of effective sales personnel, or the sales personnel are not successful in obtaining new customers or increasing our existing customers’ spend with us, our business will be adversely affected.

We allow our customers and suppliers to utilize APIs, with our platform, which could result in outages or security breaches and negatively impact our business, operating results and financial condition.

The use of APIs, by our customers and suppliers has significantly increased in recent years. Our APIs allow customers and suppliers to build their own media buying and data management interface by using our APIs to develop custom integration of their business with our platform. The increased use of APIs increases security and operational risks to our systems, including the risk for intrusion attacks, data theft, or denial of service attacks. Furthermore, while APIs allow customers and suppliers greater ease and power in accessing our platform, they also increase the risk of overusing our systems, potentially causing outages. We have experienced system slowdowns due to customer or supplier overuse of our systems through our APIs. While we have taken measures intended to decrease security and outage risks associated with the use of APIs, we cannot guarantee that such measures will be successful. Our failure to prevent outages or security breaches resulting from API use could result in government enforcement actions against us, claims for damages by consumers and other affected individuals, costs associated

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with investigation, notification, mitigation, and remediation, damage to our reputation and loss of goodwill, any of which could have a material adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition.

Operational and performance issues with our platform, whether real or perceived, including a failure to respond to technological changes or to upgrade our technology systems, may adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.

We depend upon the sustained and uninterrupted performance of our platform to manage our inventory supply, acquire inventory for each campaign; collect, process and interpret data; and optimize campaign performance in real time and provide billing information to our financial systems. If our platform cannot scale to meet demand, if there are errors in our execution of any of these functions on our platform, or if we experience outages, then our business may be harmed.

Our platform is complex and multifaceted, and operational and performance issues could arise both from the platform itself or from outside factors, such as cyberattacks or other third-party attacks. Errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs have been found in the past, and may be found in the future. Our platform also relies on third-party technology and systems to perform properly, and our platform is often used in connection with computing environments utilizing different operating systems, system management software, equipment and networking configurations, which may cause errors in, or failures of, our platform or such other computing environments. Operational and performance issues with our platform could include the failure of our user interface, outages, errors during upgrades or patches, discrepancies in costs billed versus costs paid, unanticipated volume overwhelming our databases, server failure, or catastrophic events affecting one or more server facilities. While we have built redundancies in our systems, full redundancies do not exist. Some failures will shut our platform down completely, others only partially. We provide service level agreements to some of our customers, and if our platform is not available for specified amounts of time, we may be required to provide credits or other financial compensation to our customers.

As we grow our business, we expect to continue to invest in technology services and equipment. Without these improvements, our operations might suffer from unanticipated system disruptions, slow transaction processing, unreliable service levels, impaired quality or delays in reporting accurate information regarding transactions in our platform, any of which could negatively affect our reputation and ability to attract and retain customers. In addition, the expansion and improvement of our systems and infrastructure may require us to commit substantial financial, operational and technical resources, with no assurance our business will grow. If we fail to respond to technological change or to adequately maintain, expand, upgrade and develop our systems and infrastructure in a timely fashion, our growth prospects and results of operations could be adversely affected.

Operational and performance issues with our platform could also result in negative publicity, damage to our brand and reputation, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our platform, increased costs or loss of revenue, loss of the ability to access our platform, loss of competitive position or claims by customers for losses sustained by them. Alleviating problems resulting from such issues could require significant expenditures of capital and other resources and could cause interruptions, delays or the cessation of our business, any of which may adversely affect our operating results and financial condition.

We are dependent on the continued availability of third-party hosting and transmission services. Operational issues with, or changes to the costs of, our third-party data center providers could harm our business, reputation or results of operations.

We currently serve the majority of our platform functions from third-party data center hosting facilities operated by Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, and we primarily use shared servers in such facilities. We are dependent on these third parties to provide continuous power, cooling, internet connectivity and physical and technological security for our servers, and our operations depend, in part, on their ability to protect these facilities against any damage or interruption from natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, power or telecommunication failures, criminal acts and similar events. In the event that any of our third-party facilities arrangements is terminated, or if there is a lapse of service or damage to a facility, we could experience interruptions in our platform as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services.

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Any damage to, or failure of, the systems of our third-party providers could result in interruptions to our platform. Despite precautions taken at our data centers, the occurrence of spikes in usage volume, a natural disaster, such as earthquakes or hurricane, an act of terrorism, vandalism or sabotage, a decision to close a facility without adequate notice, or other unanticipated problems at a facility could result in lengthy interruptions in the availability of our platform. Even with current and planned disaster recovery arrangements, our business could be harmed. Also, in the event of damage or interruption, our insurance policies may not adequately compensate us for any losses that we may incur. These factors in turn could further reduce our revenue, subject us to liability and cause us to issue credits or cause customers to stop using our platform, any of which could materially and adversely affect our business.

We incur significant costs with our third-party data hosting services. If the costs for such services increase due to vendor consolidation, regulation, contract renegotiation, or otherwise, we may not be able to increase the fees for our products and services to cover the changes. As a result, our operating results may be significantly worse than forecasted.

If the non-proprietary technology, software, products and services that we use are unavailable, have future terms we cannot agree to, or do not perform as we expect, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

We depend on various technology, software, products and services from third parties or available as open source, including for critical features and functionality of our platform and API technology, payment processing, payroll and other professional services. Identifying, negotiating, complying with and integrating with third-party terms and technology are complex, costly and time-consuming matters. Failure by third-party providers to maintain, support or secure their technology either generally or for our accounts specifically, or downtime, errors or defects in their products or services, could materially and adversely impact our platform, our administrative obligations or other areas of our business. Having to replace any third-party providers or their technology, products or services could result in outages or difficulties in our ability to provide our services, and our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

Our failure to meet content and inventory standards and provide services that our customers and inventory suppliers trust, could harm our brand and reputation and negatively impact our business, operating results and financial condition.

We do not provide or control the content of the advertisements we serve or that of the websites providing the inventory. Our customers provide the advertising content and inventory suppliers provide the inventory. Both customers and inventory suppliers are concerned about being associated with content they consider inappropriate, competitive or inconsistent with their brands, or illegal, and they are hesitant to spend money without guaranteed brand security. For example, our customers expect that ad placements will not be misrepresented, such as auto-play in banner placements marketed as pre-roll inventory. Consequently, our reputation depends in part on providing services that our customers and inventory suppliers trust, and we have contractual obligations to meet content and inventory standards. We contractually prohibit the misuse of our platform by agencies (and their marketer customers) and inventory suppliers. Additionally, we use our proprietary technology and third-party services to, and we participate in industry co-ops that work to, detect malware and other content issues as well as click fraud (whether by humans or software known as “bots”) and to block fraudulent inventory. Despite such efforts, our customers may inadvertently purchase inventory that proves to be unacceptable for their campaigns, in which case we may not be able to recoup the amounts paid to inventory suppliers. Preventing and combating fraud is an industry-wide issue that requires constant vigilance, as well as a balancing of cost effectiveness and risk, and we cannot guarantee that we will be fully successful in our efforts to combat fraud. We may provide access to inventory that is objectionable to our customers or we may serve advertising that contains malware or objectionable content to our inventory suppliers, which could harm our or our customers’ brand and reputation, cause customers to decrease or terminate their relationship with us or otherwise negatively impact our business, operating results and financial condition.

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We face potential liability and harm to our business based on the human factor of inputting information into our platform.

We or our customers set up campaigns on our platform using a number of available variables. While our platform includes several checks and balances, it is possible for human error to result in significant over-spending. We offer a number of protections such as daily or overall spending caps, but despite these protections, the ability for overspend exists. For example, campaigns which last for a period of time can be set to pace evenly or as quickly as possible. If a customer with a high credit limit enters an incorrect daily cap with a campaign set to a rapid pace, it is possible for a campaign to accidently go significantly over budget. Our potential liability for such errors may be higher when they occur in situations in which we are executing purchases on behalf of a customer rather than the customer using the self-service feature of our platform. While our customer contracts state that customers are responsible for media purchased through our platform, we are ultimately responsible for paying the inventory providers and we may be unable to collect when such issues occur.

Future acquisitions, strategic investments or alliances could disrupt our business and harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

We have acquired businesses and technologies to grow our business. To the extent we find suitable and attractive acquisition candidates and business opportunities in the future, we may continue to acquire other complementary businesses, products and technologies and enter into joint ventures or similar strategic relationships. We have no present commitments or agreements to enter into any such acquisitions or make any such investments. However, if we identify an appropriate acquisition candidate, we may not be successful in negotiating the terms or financing of the acquisition, and our due diligence may fail to identify all of the problems, liabilities or other shortcomings or challenges of an acquired business, product or technology, including issues related to intellectual property, product quality or architecture, regulatory compliance practices, revenue recognition or other accounting practices, tax liabilities, privacy or cybersecurity issues or employee or customer issues. There is no certainty that we will be able to successfully integrate the services, products and personnel of any acquired business into our operations. In addition, any future acquisitions, joint ventures or similar relationships may cause a disruption in our ongoing business and distract our management. Further, we may be unable to realize the revenue improvements, cost savings and other intended benefits of any such transaction. Acquisitions involve numerous other risks, any of which could harm our business, including:

 

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regulatory hurdles;

 

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failure of anticipated benefits to materialize;

 

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diversion of management time and focus from operating our business to addressing acquisition integration challenges;

 

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retention of employees from the acquired company;

 

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cultural challenges associated with integrating employees from the acquired company into our organization;

 

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integration of the acquired company’s accounting, management information, human resources and other administrative systems;

 

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the need to implement or improve controls, procedures and policies at a business that prior to the acquisition may have lacked effective controls, procedures and policies;

 

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coordination of product development and sales and marketing functions;

 

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liability for activities of the acquired company before the acquisition, including known and unknown liabilities; and

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litigation or other claims in connection with the acquired company, including claims from terminated employees, users, former stockholders or other third parties.

Failure to appropriately mitigate these risks or other issues related to such strategic investments and acquisitions could result in reducing or completely eliminating any anticipated benefits of transactions, and harm our business generally. Future acquisitions could also result in dilutive issuances of our equity securities, the incurrence of debt, contingent liabilities, amortization or the impairment of goodwill, any of which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

Our future success depends on the continuing efforts of our key employees, including Tim Vanderhook and Chris Vanderhook, and our ability to attract, hire, retain and motivate highly skilled employees in the future.

We are a founder-led business and our future success depends on the continuing efforts of our executive officers and other key employees, including Tim Vanderhook, our chief executive officer, and Chris Vanderhook, our chief operating officer. We rely on the leadership, knowledge and experience that our executive officers provide. They foster our corporate culture, which has been instrumental to our ability to attract and retain new talent. We also rely on employees in our engineering, technical, product development, support and sales teams to attract and retain key customers.

The market for talent in our key areas of operations, including California, is intensely competitive, which could increase our costs to attract and retain talented employees. As a result, we may incur significant costs to attract and retain employees, including significant expenditures related to salaries and benefits and compensation expenses related to equity awards, and we may lose new employees to our competitors or other companies before we realize the benefit of our investment in recruiting and training them. We have at times experienced employee turnover. Because of the complexity of our platform, new employees often require significant training and, in many cases, take significant time before they achieve full productivity. Our account managers, for instance, need to be trained quickly on the features of our platform since failure to offer high-quality support may adversely affect our relationships with our customers.

Employee turnover, including changes in our management team, could disrupt our business. None of our founders or other key employees has an employment agreement for a specific term, and any of our employees may terminate his or her employment with us at any time. The loss of one or more of our executive officers, especially our two founders, or our inability to attract and retain highly skilled employees could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

We face liabilities arising out of our ownership and operation of Myspace.com.

In 2011, we acquired Myspace LLC, which owns Myspace.com. We have faced and may continue to face claims, investigations, or lawsuits or incur liability as a result of content published or made available on Myspace.com, including claims for defamation, intellectual property rights, including copyright infringement, rights of publicity and privacy, illegal content, misinformation, content regulation and personal injury torts. The laws relating to the liability of providers of online products or services for activities of the people who use them remain somewhat unsettled, both within the United States and internationally. This risk is enhanced in certain jurisdictions outside the United States where our protection from liability for third-party actions may be unclear or where we may be less protected under local laws than we are in the United States. For example, in April 2019, the European Union passed a directive expanding online platform liability for copyright infringement and regulating certain uses of news content online, which member states had to implement by June 2021. In addition, there have been various Congressional efforts, executive actions, and civil litigation efforts to restrict the scope of the protections available to online platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and our current protections from liability for third-party content in the United States could decrease or change. We could incur significant costs investigating and defending claims related to content published or made available on Myspace.com and, if we are found liable, could face significant damages.

In late 2011, shortly after we acquired Myspace LLC, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) initiated an investigation of the entity relating to certain of its historical privacy practices in place between 2008 and 2010. In

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connection with its 2012 settlement, Myspace LLC agreed to a consent order barring it from misrepresenting the extent to which it protects the privacy of users’ personal information or the extent to which it belongs to or complies with any privacy, security or other compliance program. The order also mandates Myspace LLC establish a comprehensive privacy program designed to protect consumers’ information, and to obtain biennial assessments of its privacy program by independent, third-party auditors for 20 years. The order terminates in August 2032.

If Myspace LLC fails to comply with the mandates of the consent order, or if Myspace LLC is found to be in violation of the consent order or other requirements, we may be subject to regulatory or governmental investigations or lawsuits, which may result in significant monetary fines, judgments, or other penalties, and we may also be required to make additional changes to our business practices.

Myspace.com has been and may in the future be subject to cybersecurity incidents or data breaches. In 2016, we discovered a third-party cyber-attack in which Myspace.com usernames, passwords and email addresses were stolen from the old Myspace.com platform prior to June 11, 2013. While we took steps to remediate the attack, including notifying and invalidating the passwords of known affected users, any present failure to prevent or mitigate security breaches and improper access to or disclosure of the data on Myspace.com could result in litigation, indemnity obligations, regulatory enforcement actions, investigations, fines, penalties, mitigation and remediation costs, disputes, reputational harm, diversion of management’s attention, and other liabilities and damage to our business. Myspace.com may also face operational or performance issues. For example, as a result of a server migration project in 2019, older photo, video or audio files of some users were lost.

Myspace.com has in the past been, and may in the future be, the subject of unfavorable publicity regarding, for example, its privacy practices, site quality and site operational matters. Myspace.com may also face negative publicity relating to content or information that is published or made available on the platform, including defamation, dissemination of misinformation or news hoaxes, discrimination, violations of intellectual property rights, violations of rights of publicity and privacy, hate speech or other types of content. Any such negative publicity could damage our reputation and the reputation of our primary business, which could adversely affect our business and financial results.

The market in which we participate is intensely competitive, and we may not be able to compete successfully with our current or future competitors.

We operate in a highly competitive and rapidly changing industry that is subject to changing technology and customer demands and that includes many companies providing competing solutions. With the introduction of new technologies and the influx of new entrants into the market, we expect competition to persist and intensify in the future, which could harm our ability to increase revenue and maintain profitability. New technologies and methods of buying advertising present a dynamic competitive challenge, as market participants offer multiple new products and services aimed at capturing advertising spend.

We compete with smaller, privately-held companies, with public companies such as The Trade Desk, and with divisions of large, well-established companies such as Google and Amazon. Our current and potential competitors may have significantly more financial, technical, marketing and other resources than we have, allowing them to devote greater resources to the development, promotion, sale and support of their products and services. They may also have more extensive customer bases and broader supplier relationships than we have. As a result, these competitors may be better able to respond quickly to new technologies, develop deeper marketer relationships or offer services at lower prices. Increased competition may result in reduced pricing for our platform, increased sales and marketing expense, longer sales cycles or a decrease of our market share, any of which could negatively affect our revenue and future operating results and our ability to grow our business. These companies may also have greater brand recognition and longer histories than we have and may actively seek to serve our market and have the power to significantly change the nature of the marketplace to their advantage. Some of our larger competitors, particularly those that are divisions of large companies, have substantially broader product offerings and may leverage their relationships based on other products or incorporate functionality into existing products to gain business in a manner that may discourage customers from using our platform, including through selling at zero or negative margins or product bundling with other services they provide at reduced prices. Customers may prefer to purchase advertising from social medial platforms or other closed platforms, which they cannot acquire through our platform. Potential customers may also prefer to purchase from their existing platform rather than a new platform

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regardless of product performance or features. These larger competitors often have broader product lines and market focus and may therefore not be as susceptible to downturns in a particular market. We may also experience negative market perception as a result of being a smaller company than our larger competitors.

In addition, we derive a significant portion of our revenue from advertising in the desktop and mobile and connected TV channels, which are rapidly evolving, highly competitive, complex and fragmented. We face significant competition in these markets which we expect will intensify in the future. While fewer of our competitors currently have capability in other channels such as linear TV, in-game streaming audio and digital billboard channels, we also expect to face additional competition in those channels in the future.

Our corporate culture has contributed to our success and, if we are unable to maintain it as we grow, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

We have experienced and may continue to experience rapid expansion of our employee ranks. We had approximately 350 employees in the United States as of December 31, 2021. We believe our corporate culture has been critical to our success and we have invested substantial time and resources in building our team within our company culture. However, as our organization grows, it may be difficult to maintain our culture, which could reduce our ability to innovate and operate effectively and proactively focus on and pursue our corporate objectives. The failure to maintain the key aspects of our culture as our organization grows could result in decreased employee satisfaction, increased difficulty in attracting top talent, increased turnover and degraded quality of customer service, all of which are important to our success and to the effective execution of our business strategy. In the event we are unable to maintain our corporate culture as we grow to scale, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

The market growth forecasts included in this Annual Report may prove to be inaccurate