SINGAPORE — ADA, the largest independent analytics, data, and AI digital marketing business in the region across 9 markets in South and Southeast Asia announces USD60 million investment from SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), a Fortune 500 telecommunications company with strong investment portfolio headquartered in Japan.
Established in 2018, ADA has seen tremendous growth in its services in designing and executing integrated analytics, data, and AI digital marketing solutions, serving over 1,300 clients in the region. ADA’s differentiating factor lies in its proprietary technology IP in data processing, data ingestion, and consumer AI models; gleaned from 375 million consumer profiles on monthly basis. Supporting this is ADA’s diverse talent pool of over 600 data scientists, digital media gurus, industry experts, and management consultants.
SoftBank will make ADA as a core to its digital and data marketing arm, and leverage their network of portfolio companies, creating huge synergy globally. This alliance allows SoftBank to expand their footprint in the region by bringing its customer data platform (CDP), ‘Treasure Data’; and the consumer base of its communication app, ‘LINE’ for the benefit of brands and marketers.
With this funding, ADA will continue its development of AI models, with primary focus on precision targeting for the marketing industry; invest in content analytics and automation of content creation; and also create data platforms to deliver consumer insights, predict consumer mindset, and help business decisioning.
Srinivas Gattamneni, Chief Executive Officer of ADA, said, “The post-COVID-19 norm is a ‘digital-first’ economy, which ADA has been successfully building towards. We are very excited to welcome SoftBank Corp. as a valuable partner in our next phase of growth. The capital and business alliance with SoftBank Corp. will further propel ADA’s analytics, data, and AI digital marketing solutions for the benefit of our customers across the region.”
Daichi Nozaki, Vice President and Head of the Enterprise Business Unit’s Global Business Division, SoftBank Corp., said: “We believe this alliance between SoftBank and ADA will reshape the digital marketing and data landscape in the Asia-Pacific region. This move is part of our Beyond Carrier growth strategy as we seek to expand beyond the traditional telecommunications business; and by combining our diversified solutions and technologies with ADA’s expertise in the area of analytics, data, and AI digital marketing, we expect we can both generate significant synergies.”
Mohd Khairil Abdullah, Chairman of ADA, said: “We welcome the investments by SoftBank Corp., which brings tremendous growth opportunities for ADA. It also marks a significant milestone, especially with Southeast Asia’s digital market poised to potentially become one of the world’s top five digital economies1. The investment from SoftBank Corp. is recognition of ADA as the vehicle to capture the ensuing growth.”
Post the investment, SoftBank will own 23.07% shareholding of ADA, establishing ADA’s valuation at USD 260 million.
