14. Powerlinks Media

Founders: Kevin Flood and Mike Harty
Founded: February 2012
Website: www.PowerLinks.com

Programmatic native advertising platform Powerlinks Media is a recurring member of the Startups 100 list (and a Startups Awards nominee), having originally secured a place due to its revolutionary approach to affiliate advertising. The start-up has since proved its staying power by securing a number of impressive publishing clients like Unruly Media, as well as following through with overseas aspirations by securing major global and American contacts including Vibrant, Pubmatic and ShareThrough.

The business, launched in 2012 by serial entrepreneurs Kevin Flood and Mike Harty on the back of their successful social shopping site Shopow, is enjoying a period of accelerated growth. Its innovative technology, which powers new ‘native’ digital advertising formats for leading global buying and selling networks, saw the duo secure 50 further major advertising platforms for the next six months. The latest raft of client integrations will see the company serving over 50 billion native adverts per month.

As the first native advertising company to make in-app ads available on a highly targeted basis for content marketers – which they expect to be huge as the market is predicted to grow to $8bn by 2018. The group, whose mission it is to create a “more personalised and less annoying internet”, plan to continue to lead in the affiliate advertising world and will be launching partnerships in Latin America and Scandinavia later this year.