FreeWheel to Acquire Ad Tech Leader Beeswax

Acquisition will enable FreeWheel clients to participate more seamlessly in the growing programmatic TV ecosystem.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FreeWheel announced today that it has agreed to acquire Beeswax, a software as a service (SaaS) advertising company. The acquisition will expand FreeWheel’s current programmatic marketplace capabilities across all forms of television and video advertising, including Connected TV (CTV) and Set-top Box Video on Demand (STB VOD). This transaction is expected to close in January 2021, pending regulatory approvals. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Beeswax offers programmatic advertising capabilities through its unique Bidder-as-a-Service™ (Baas) customizable bidding stack, used by leading media companies and brands. This capability will complement FreeWheel’s existing technologies and add value to its current supply-side and demand-side clients. The exponential growth of programmatic transactions has driven a need for more customizable and flexible bidding technologies to serve a diversifying user base, including publishers who increasingly use programmatic technology to acquire incremental inventory and extend audience reach for their advertisers.

“Together, FreeWheel and Beeswax can further enhance how television operates. As the ecosystem becomes increasingly complex, sellers and buyers of media want similar capabilities: great automation, simplicity, and the ability to manage data-driven campaigns across hundreds of endpoints. By incorporating Beeswax’s technology into FreeWheel’s offering, we can deliver even more value to clients of both companies, helping them better navigate and succeed in this new landscape,” said Dave Clark, General Manager, FreeWheel.

“The team at Beeswax has a well-earned reputation for innovation and technological leadership. We couldn’t be more excited about combining our efforts, visions, and roles in the ecosystem to build technology that provides television with the transformation it so eagerly awaits,” added Clark.

Beeswax’s complementary capabilities will help expand and accelerate FreeWheel’s current programmatic technologies, improving FreeWheel’s clients’ abilities to trade inventory with automation. In particular, Beeswax’s bidding technology will allow for FreeWheel users to access broader pools of inventory to fulfill complex campaign requirements. This is important to FreeWheel clients across both the demand side and the supply side. Beeswax's customers will benefit from the scale and expertise of FreeWheel within the video and CTV advertising sectors, while gaining the support, product investment, and technology leadership Freewheel provides.

“We’re looking forward to integrating our BaaS platform into FreeWheel’s global infrastructure to accelerate our vision of giving our customers greater flexibility, transparency, and control over their media buying,” said Ari Paparo, CEO, Beeswax. “Now, together with Freewheel, we can deliver scale across all programmatic channels, including advanced TV advertising.”

About FreeWheel

FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, empowers all segments of The New TV Ecosystem. We are structured to provide the full breadth of solutions the advertising industry needs to achieve their goals. We provide the technology, data enablement, and convergent marketplaces required to ensure buyers and sellers can transact across all screens, across all data types, and all sales channels, in order to ensure the ultimate goal – results for marketers.

With offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Paris, Beijing, and across the globe, FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, stands to advocate for the entire industry through the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more information, please visit freewheel.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Beeswax

Founded in 2014 by a team of former Google executives, Beeswax is the programmatic buying platform that gives media buyers ownership and total control. Its Bidder-as-a-Service™ platform gives brands, media companies, and advertising technology firms greater control, flexibility, and transparency over their programmatic advertising. Beeswax customers include Uber, DraftKings and Nexstar. Beeswax is headquartered in New York City, and has raised $28 million in funding from leading investors including Foundry Group, RRE, You & Mr. Jones, and Amasia.vc.