With the current economic conditions, finding funding can be a challenge for many young companies – or even established ones. Sometimes it helps to get creative.
For Yieldex – a company that predicts available online advertising inventory to help optimize campaigns – that creative funding angle came in the form of participating in the Amazon Web Service Start-Up Challenge. And it paid off, twofold. Not only did they end the week with an extra $100,000 by winning the second annual Amazon AWS Start-Up Challenge, they also – as we reported in Jobwire – managed to woo a former AOL exec to join the team.
The Yieldex solution was selected from nearly 1,000 start-up applicants, all of whom have built solutions on the Amazon Web Services platform. In addition to the cash prize, winning the award means that the judges deemed the Yieldex solution an original way of meeting a marketplace need using AWS.
Clearly, the judges weren’t the only ones who found the solution compelling. The former Senior Vice President for Network Development at AOL’s Platform A, Larry Allen, has joined the Yieldex executive team as President. Allen joins a team that has its roots in Matchlogic and NetGravity, two online advertising oriented companies from the dotcom days.
Yieldex follows in the footsteps of Ooyala, the winner of the inaugural contest. We reviewed Ooyala last year about this time.
What Yieldex actually does or how it really helps advertisers optimize their inventory remains a bit cloudy, but we’ll be sure to keep an eye on their progress.
