• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 29, 2022

Lunio, a company focused on click-fraud prevention, announced it has closed $15 million in Series A funding.

The goal is to help digital marketers get the most from advertising budgets by identifying and excluding fake and invalid web traffic from different traffic acquisition channels.

London and Stavanger-based venture capital funding Smedvig Capital led the financing. Senior leaders at Google and Warner also participated in the round. The companies announced the round on Thursday.

Neil Andrew, CEO and founder of Lunio, believes the funding will open significant opportunities for Lunio to gain market share.

The funds raised will help Lunio accelerate the development of its technology while supporting further expansion into the EMEA and North American markets.

Despite having the financial backing from some Google “senior leaders,” Lunio has competition from other click fraud prevention companies like CHEQ, and Human Security. But there’s plenty of work to be done.

Fake and fraudulent ad traffic saw $35 billion in global losses from ad fraud in 2020, the company said citing Statista data.

The WFA (World Federation of Advertisers) estimates that globally, ad fraud is likely to represent in excess of $50 billion by 2025.

Invalid traffic inflates advertising performance measurements, resulting in the misidentification of customers and inaccurate marketing insights. With digital advertising spending expected to reach $1 trillion by 2025, and with 36% of display ad clicks deemed fraudulent and invalid, per Lunio data, the scale of wasted spend is projected to rise further, harming traffic acquisition efforts and resulting in poor advertising performance.

Lunio works with more than 25 ad networks including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Bing, Yandex, TikTok, and Snapchat. Non-paid and affiliate channel support will launch soon. The goal is to help marketers defeat invalid web traffic and gain more control of campaign budgets, Lunio uses a combination of data analysis and cybersecurity techniques to catch and block fake clicks at the source.

Neil Andrew, Segev Hochberg, and Alex Winston co-founded the company in 2016.