Ep 151: Tanja Mimica of Kovva on What the Future Holds for Media Buyers

AdTechGod (0:00)

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Welcome to the AdTechGod Pod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to another episode of the AdTechGodPod, where I speak to the female co-founders of our industry. With me today is Tanja Mimica. She's the co-founder and COO of a company called Kovva. Tanja has seen media buying from just about every angle in the industry. She started as a programmatic trader, went on to co-found Martin, which sold to Pubmatic, which is a publicly traded company, and then helped lead Pubmatics activate business prior to this. Kovva, which is what she's building today, is an AI platform focused on automating operational work that media buyers still do every single day. This is across DSPs, ad servers, measurement, spreadsheets, Slack, email, smoke signals, everything. Kovva has got you covered. I'm excited to meet Tanja. She's a friend of the podcast. I'm familiar with the team there, so I'm really excited to talk to her and understand how she got to where she's at today. Thank you for joining me, Tanja.

Tanja Mimica (1:57)

Thanks. Excited to be here.

AdTechGod (2:00)

Not the first time you co-found a company. Would love to hear your background, what you did prior. I know I covered it a little bit, but what got you to initially start something like Martin, your time at PubMatic, and then why you're building Kovva. I'd love to hear your background.

Tanja Mimica (2:15)

Yeah, sure. We co-founded Martin back in 2018, and neither my co-founder nor I had a background in AdTech, yet somehow our brand new startup after a couple of pivots, as startups often do, we ended up in this space.

We barely knew what a media agency was, but we got an opportunity to partner with one. We literally worked out of their offices with the goal of identifying a problem and solving it with tech, and then we would go into commercialize beyond that agency. So it was there that we first came across the wonderful world of Programmatic, and the volume and velocity of data made it an obvious candidate for a machine learning application. So we actually started by building custom bidding algorithms on top of existing DSPs.

Most clients optimized towards CPA, which we noticed over time was flawed because the attribution methodology rewards low frequency, high reach campaigns, so impressions that likely would have converted without ads. So we kind of became obsessed with incrementality measurement, and we felt that in order to close the loop on incrementality, so to measure it and optimize toward it, we needed to build a DSP from the ground up, which is what we did. I think many people thought we were crazy to be building a DSP in 2018, but I think not coming from AdTech actually helped. So it was both easier to kind of break out some of the existing paradigms. And I think in hindsight, had we known what building a DSP and trying to compete against the traders can do with 360 actually involved, we may not have done it. So I think our naivety served us well in the end.

AdTechGod (3:54)

I mean, it's such a competitive market, building out a DSP and even just getting it in the hands of traders, like you can build it, but then getting it in the hands of traders is a whole other feat on its own.

Like very difficult, hard to scale. I know there's a few in the market that are on the, I guess smaller side that their biggest challenge is really not the technology per se, but it's really like, how do I get hundreds, if not thousands of people to use this?

Tanja Mimica (4:19)

Exactly, and so that's where we got to. So by that stage, we had only raised less than a million, I think it was like 850,000. And then in 2022, we were raising Series A funding, exactly as you said, like with the goal of now scaling that beyond the handful of clients we were working with.

And a number of strategic partnership conversations kind of organically happened during that process of raising around. And after a couple of months, we had a decision to make. So it was either raise VC funding to grow Martin, or join an existing company that already had that global presence in the sales team that we were essentially raising money to build, to bring our product to more agencies and advertisers. And we chose the latter. So in September 22, we were acquired by PubMatic, and Martin became the basis of Activate, which is now AdTech OS.