SureWaves Raises Rs.10 Crore From India Innovation Fund & Accel Partners

SureWaves MediaTech, the Bangalore based cross-media-advertising-platform company, has raised Rs 10 crore as early stage venture capital from India Innovation Fund and Accel Partners, reports The Times of India. The company essentially has two business lines: it started off with a centrally managed digital Signage or Out of Hone advertising platform, and diversified into providing advertising for digital cable TV networks. It has:

– An Out Of Home business, called the “Surewaves Media Grid”, allowing advertisers and publishers to aggregate, manage and control advertising, with a feedback path. Surewaves’ feedback path is through bluetooth. Competition in this space includes that from Live Media, OOH India and DSN, among others.

– A local advertising and content solution for digital TV: SureWaves allows broadcasters to offer city-based local advertising or insert local content at a city level by substituting content and advertising at the MSO cable head-ends/ distribution, replacing content from national feeds. This means that a particular advertiser can choose to advertise in specific cities on national and local channels on cable networks who have a tie-up with the agency. Most channels keep spots for localized ads or replace them with in-house program promos, in areas where there are no tie-ups. The local advertisement insertion at MSO (Multi Service Operator) or distribution point is control based, on a central trigger provided by the Broadcast channel.

Last year, it partnered with Asianet Satellite Communications, a cable TV and Internet service provider in Kerala,to provide its advertising and local content management solution to Asianet, and act as sales partner for advertising on its channels, for markets outside Kerala, bringing national level advertisers to advertise on the six local channels from Asianet Cable Vision, targeting a local viewership on the cable network.

In this part of the business, SureWaves competes with Amagi, and Rediff powered VuBites.