On the morning Liftoff Mobile finally hit the public markets and raised $437 million, CEO Jeremy Bondy sat down with Digiday to explain why the company, backed by a private equity firm Blackstone, decided to make its initial public offering now and how he intends to thrive as a Nasdaq-listed entity.
Earlier this year, Liftoff walked away from a hotly received roadshow after markets suffered their “SaaS-apocalypse” wobble, sending investors scrambling to triage their portfolios rather than back new listings.
Since then, Liftoff has notched a “tenth consecutive quarter of growth,” markets have stabilized, and investors have started to regain confidence, with Bondy arguing that now is the window the company has been waiting for — even if the June raise was short of its initial ambitions.
In conversatiaon with Digiday, Bondy framed the firm as a pure-play, AI-driven performance engine for the app economy, distinct from both “traditional ad-tech incumbents” and Big Tech, stressing the Blackstone-backed outfit’s role in the “highly fragmented ecosystem of 4 million apps” in helping them acquire and monetize users, with the outfit’s neural net–based recommendation engine Cortex at the core of its monetization efforts.
