Topsort: Why We Invested
We are excited to share that Upload Ventures led a financing round in Topsort and that our Managing Partner Carlos Simonsen has become a member of the board. We are also joined by investors Quiet Capital and Pear VC.
Topsort is a company built by a world-class founding and technology team seeking to disrupt retail media advertising by providing advertising infrastructure for marketplaces and a new product-based ad-network made by marketplaces to advertisers. This venture represents the first investment from the Upload Ventures Growth Fund. Prior to this, the team evaluated over 3,500 investment opportunities, ultimately identifying Topsort and its founders, Regina and Francisco, as having the potential and capability to build a transformative company that we are eager to partner with.
For Topsort, Upload Ventures brought strategic value, as we can support rapid regional expansion by capitalizing on our extensive network of over 3,000 B2B relationships, go-to-market capabilities, and specialized sector expertise. The investment aligns with our strategy to support global founders entering the LatAm Market and accelerating their go-to-market into the region.
As with many Upload Ventures investments, TopSort has a global footprint impacting their customers from the United States to Brazil to Thailand. Operating in over 35 different countries, we have been impressed by how they are empowering marketplaces around the world to build their advertising businesses. By providing retail media infrastructure, TopSort integrates Marketplaces with bleeding edge technology, enabling them to offer competitive advertising inventory, through an automatic, auction-based algorithm, to advertisers through their digital real estate. As the process becomes automated and digitized with Topsort, advertisers also benefit from algorithmic pricing, precise return on ad spend (ROAS), and product-based inventory. This transforms what has traditionally been a manual workflow into a digital, measurable channel that provides a similar experience to what advertisers have become accustomed to in off-site ad networks such as Google and Meta.
The business was conceived to establish a unified global solution for product-based advertising, developed upon a unique approach centered around auctions, AI, and data science. The solution aimed to reimagine advertising; instead of focusing solely on audience data, it employed auto-bid auctions and automation driven by product data. This innovative approach is designed to outperform traditional, audience-centric markets. They have democratized “Amazon-level advertising” through auction-based marketplace monetization technology, making it accessible to all.
Like Topsort, we believe that advertising budgets will move closer to the moment when a purchase decision is made, and therefore believe there is an opportunity for retailers and marketplaces to build their own advertising businesses with retail media. Supported by the success stories of Amazon, Doordash, and Instacart, it is evident that we are in the midst of a structural change in the business model as marketplaces increase their revenues with a high-margin advertising business.
We also believe the time is now and we are in a crucible moment to build and scale Topsort, as favorable tailwinds have emerged. Privacy regulations like ATT, GDPR, and CPA are creating new opportunities for first-party data advertising. With increasing restrictions being imposed on user tracking and data privacy, the value of private advertising infrastructures with proprietary data has surged. This shift significantly impacts businesses that have their own user and usage data such as marketplaces that have retail media offerings. These entities are at liberty to collect and leverage this data for selling ads since all data collection, ad targeting, and conversion occur on the same platform, thereby not subject to the restrictions applicable to Meta and Google.
To enable this, TopSort has created a platform that has become the best-in-class solution globally for marketplaces to build their ad businesses and for advertisers to invest their retail media budget. As one customer expressed, “Advertising has always been a significant opportunity in our marketplace, but having come from Amazon, where we developed an in-house solution, we realized that building such a system was beyond our expertise. Having known what ‘good’ looked like at Amazon, I can say that TopSort has brought us a comparable experience. Just as you need to know good wine to appreciate it, my experience with Amazon has helped me recognize the excellence of TopSort.”
Since meeting Francisco and Regina three years ago, we’ve watched them continually improve as leaders, transforming an idea into a robust platform. Now, Topsort is continually changing how marketplaces build their advertising businesses. We are excited to be investors and a part of their journey as they transform retail media and build the first product-based ad network.
Co-Authored by Alfredo Hahn and Carlos Simonsen
