• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, September 22, 2016

The Trade Desk had a coming-out party of sorts on Wednesday when it went public on the Nasdaq at a price of $28.75 per share—that’s a 60% rise from its initial target price range of between $16 and $18 per share. The stock ended the trading day at $30.10 per share, placing the company’s market cap at nearly $1 billion.

The Trade Desk, a demand-side platform that enables the purchase of display, video, audio, native and social inventory, across desktop, mobile, and connected TV, logged a profitable 2015 with revenue more than doubling year-over-year, to $113.8 million.

Real-Time Daily caught up with Chief Client Officer Brian Stempeck, who said the company plans to make global investments in programmatic TV focusing on APAC.  In terms of how the IPO will affect existing operations, Stempeck said: “The IPO furthers our independence. We remain focused on supporting our clients and innovating through our technology.”

He emphasized that the industry is only at the beginning of the programmatic wave: “Only $10 billion of the $640 billion global advertising spend is currently transacted programmatically. Eventually, we believe all media will be bought and sold this way.”

Stempeck added, "Now more than ever, it is critical for media buyers to be able to look across the entire media landscape in real time, using data to define exactly which impressions a campaign needs, and how much each one is worth.”

Stempeck said The Trade Desk will continue to invest in its TV and mobile offerings, and expand its APIs. “Nearly 50% of our clients have built on top of our APIs, which signals they are confident enough in our business to build their businesses on top of ours,” he said.

Regarding global growth, he stressed that only a third of global ad spending takes place in the U.S., so the time is right to expand internationally: “We plan to open four more offices around the world by the end of Q1 2017 in Madrid and Paris in the E.U., and Jakarta and Shanghai in APAC.”