Rémi Lemonnier, an alliance for the best in digital marketing

For Rémi Lemonnier, being a "normalien" also means being a businessman. As evidence, he has recently valued his company, Scibids, at $125 million within Double Verify, a publicly traded company specializing in online advertising security.

From being a partner to becoming an acquirer, the move was made in the fall of 2023. "The question of acquisition naturally arose as we developed more and more business with Double Verify" rejoices Rémi Lemonnier, who founded Scibids with Julien Hirth in 2016.

A win-win strategy 

There is now a real convergence of strategic interests between the two companies, with their respective offerings being highly complementary. "Double Verify's flagship product is detecting online advertising fraud, known as 'Brand Safety'" explains Rémi. It ensures advertisers that their ads don't appear on fraudulent sites created solely to capture ad budgets or on sites potentially harmful to their brands. However, he details, this solution currently relies on a binary strategy. The advertiser decides to buy or not based on risk factors for their brand. Scibids, on the other hand, develops a solution more finely adapted to the advertiser's purchasing strategy as it is based on the concept of online performance marketing, its specialty. Once potential harm to the advertiser is detected, the proposed solution takes into account the right moment to genuinely generate online performance.

Marrying teams and expertise 

For Rémi, Double Verify's acquisition of Scibids benefits both companies: Scibids gains access to Double Verify's client portfolio (among the world's largest advertisers), while Double Verify improves the performance of its offering through Scibids' technology. "The acquisition by Double Verify is very positive as it has valued both the business, technology, and the Scibids team. That's what makes it a great story, and that's why we agreed to sell" he says. No impact, therefore, on the Scibids team (70 people), which continues its momentum with its own development goals and product performance improvement. It joins forces with Double Verify to form a group of a thousand people worldwide.

For now, Rémi Lemonnier is more focused on the organizational and human aspects of this integration. How fast should it go? How to make teams work together? Which sectors to retain, and where collaboration with Double Verify makes sense? "We are considering various hypotheses: on product, sales, finance, legal, etc. For example, we already know that integration makes sense for administrative functions. By relieving the Scibids teams of certain tasks, they can better focus on their core business."

No consequences either on the strong ties that Scibids maintains with ENS Paris-Saclay. "On the contrary!" exclaims Rémi. "We need to recruit [data scientists] even more now as we are even more ambitious in our growth and investment goals to improve the performance of our products," concludes the happy co-CEO of Scibids.