What problem does Symbiosys solve?
As commerce media grows, Symbiosys is betting on the growth of offsite advertising. Retailers are bullish on offsite ads as a way to sell more without cramming units onto ecommerce websites.
“Excluding Amazon, most of the retail media revenue is still onsite. That’s the lion’s share,” Kachachi said. Onsite will continue to be a “crucial component,” he explained, but “offsite has the potential to be multiple times bigger.”
Symbiosys sells a white-labeled, self-service platform that plugs into a retailer’s first-party data and product inventory.
It lets advertisers run search, social and video campaigns by pulling the products that advertisers want to promote directly from a retailer’s product inventory. The ads direct people to the product page on the retailer’s ecommerce website. Retailers can then promote the ads using their own marketing dollars—a process Symbiosys calls collaborative bidding.
How does it make money?
Retailers pay a fee for the use of the platform.
Symbiosys has invested in expanding its customer base, product capabilities and media channels and adding to its staff since raising its Series A funding, Kachachi said. The company has 30 to 35 employees, which is “very engineering-heavy,” he said. He expects that headcount could grow by another 50% by the end of the year, depending on customer requirements and demand.
The offering is “very light on customizations” at this point, noted one buyer familiar with the company, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They have a nice idea that needs a little more time to mature.”
Still, the buyer did say that it could be a fit for one client, especially if Symbiosys can effectively de-duplicate sales attribution from search ads.
Who are its biggest competitors?
Kachachi said that Symbiosys fills a niche that other retail media startups don’t fill. However, a growing number of retail media firms including Criteo, Epsilon and Koddi are similarly betting big on offsite retail media. Google and Microsoft are also large players in retail media adtech.
Colleen Gomez, global head of performance marketing and analytics at HP, said the brand’s ad buys with Symbiosys are separate from other retail media and programmatic campaigns bought with The Trade Desk. For example, HP can target Best Buy’s shoppers on Google Ads and get data on sales attribution, scooping up low- to-mid-funnel customers with a high purchase intent.
