• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 22, 2019

The Trade Desk late Thursday reported that marketers spent more than $2.35 billion on its platform in 2018, resulting in $477 million in revenue for the year, up 55% compared with 2017.

Its fourth-quarter revenue growth also accelerated, up 56% to a record $160.5 million. In 2019, the company expects gross spend on its platform will reach $3.2 billion with revenue of $637 million. 

The company attributed this growth to strong customer retention -- which remained more than 95% during the quarter -- along with new product and features in its platform, for driving the growth.

In 2019, The Trade Desk founder and CEO Jeff Green states that the company will continue to make “aggressive investments in high growth areas such as Connected TV, data, and global expansion, including in China.”

The focus will turn to “grabbing” additional programmatic market share by deepening the engagement the company has with customers.

Green acknowledged during the earnings call with investors that the company invested 40% of its engineering resources for nearly two years to launch Next Wave, which the company built on artificial intelligence and released in June 2018. He also called last year one of building partnerships.

The Trade Desk also partnered with SpotX, a video advertising and monetization platform, integrating with its unified ID solution. The idea is to improve user match rates across the digital advertising media to increase the number of addressable audiences available to brands.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, The Trade Desk hired a new chief talent officer, Shelley Zajic, who brings to the company more than 25 years of experience in talent acquisition, human resources, and leadership.

Despite Zajic’s background in spirits, education and healthcare, she feels confident in working for an ad company that is deeply steeped in technology. “In every organization I’ve worked, technology has always been an area to develop as a talent magnet regardless of industry,” she wrote in an email earlier this month to Digital News Daily, acknowledging that it has been an industry change.