EatAds, the Online Marketplace for Offline Ads, Raises Funds and Adds 2 New Co-Founders

The newly-expanded EatAds founder crew: (L-R) Nigel, Dhruv, John.

We’re seeing a great proliferation in online marketplaces in Asia this year, and here’s another one that’s blossoming. Singapore-based EatAds is a marketplace for the buying and selling of outdoor advertising space in Asia and Europe, and it has announced today that the startup has an undisclosed sum of seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments, along with some angel investor backing. Plus, it’s also “currently preparing to raise the next funding round of SG$600,000” (US$493,000).

When we last looked at EatAds in September of last year, it was expanding aggressively across Asia. Now we find that the traditional ads marketplace has listings in 16 countries, including as far afield as the US and the UK.

But the startup admits it was, in its own words, “dormant but functioning” for the last year. Now, however, it is revitalized with two new co-founders - Dhruv Sahgal and Nigel Hembrow - alongside the original, John Fearon. You might recognize John from his startup efforts after EatAds, namely Dropmyemail and Dropmysite, both of which have been growing quickly in the past year - and taking up a lot of his time.

An EatAds representative tells us that the site currently has one office based in Singapore, and will eventually expand overseas.

The revamped EatAds crew believes that the offline ads market is riddled with inefficiencies, and is really hard for businesses to navigate. Nigel points out in today’s announcement that there’s “60 percent occupancy in outdoor advertising in India,” so it’s clearly a broken system. Dhruv chips in to say:

Around Asia, many people don’t know how to buy billboards, who to contact, and what are the prices – there are too many barriers. And in addition we are making it much easier for traditional buying agencies to serve their clients.