WELCOMING OUR NEW CEO, SERGE MATTA
By Michael Avon, CEO & Founder - August 07, 2019
On to the Next Stage of Growth at ICX Media
We made a big announcement today at ICX Media. I am incredibly excited that Serge Matta has joined us as our new CEO & President. Serge is a long-time veteran in analytics, measurement and data technology companies focused on media, content and marketing. Serge was one of the earliest employees at Comscore, where he eventually rose to become President and then CEO. More recently, Serge has been the President at GroundTruth, a mobile location data business helping media and entertainment companies and brands better understand their customers’ interests and behaviors. Throughout his impressive career, Serge has been a leader in sales, marketing, product and operations and has worked with most of the top media and entertainment companies, brands and technology companies in the industry. We think his experience and success over the years is a perfect fit for what we are doing here at ICX Media. When I talked to the board earlier this year about bringing in a new CEO to scale our go-to-market efforts, Serge was at the top of my target list. I am so thrilled that he chose to join our team!
With the addition of Serge as CEO, I am moving to the Executive Chairman role at ICX Media. As I told the team when we announced this change a few weeks back, the change in title won’t result in a major change in my role. As the principal founder of ICX Media, I will continue to be deeply involved in the business, with an ongoing focus on market strategy, corporate development, product strategy and business development. I’ll work closely with Serge to support his go-to-market efforts and operational leadership and will remain in my role as Chairman of the Board of Directors. I’ll continue to invest and sit on other boards as I have in the past but will be deeply involved with ICX Media’s continued growth under Serge’s day-to-day leadership.
In addition to the announcement about Serge, we also announced a financing update today. We raised an additional $6.6 million earlier this year, led by Boston-based venture fund PJC with participation from a group of current and new equity and debt investors. As part of the funding, PJC’s Managing Partner, David Martirano, joined our board of directors. I’d like to welcome David to the board, where he joins the truly impressive group of executives and venture capitalists that we have assembled over the last few years. The additional funding from the recent financing round will be used primarily to scale our go-to-market efforts as we ramp up our sales and marketing to media & entertainment companies and brands. We will also continue to make new investments in product, technology and data science as we further scale the business.
Those who know me, know that I am passionate about what we are doing at ICX Media. Over a decade ago, I had a vision about the future of video and that vision has become ICX Media. I remain highly focused on achieving the vision we laid out when we started the company. I am extraordinarily proud of what we have built and what we have accomplished over the past four years. And I could not be more impressed with the core team we have built here at ICX Media and the amazing group of clients, investors, advisors and board members we’ve attracted over the past four years. Now, with our additional funding and with the go-to-market leadership Serge is bringing to the team, we are ready to take our next step as a market leader.
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have a business partner like Serge to come in and take over day-to-day leadership at ICX Media. When my co-founders and I started ICX Media four years ago, we had a vision that we could harness data science, machine learning and software to change the way content is created, distributed and monetized. We shared a mission to empower independent video creators, while helping all creators and publishers of video content to be more efficient and effective in creating and distributing content most likely to engage target audiences.
Given my obsessive use of sports metaphors, I have often referred to our concept as “Moneyball for content”, believing that we could revolutionize content creation with data, analytics and data science in the same way analytics and science has revolutionized sports. Now with a growing customer base of streaming services, publishers, broadcasters, brands and agencies, we are finally able to see our original vision come to life in the fast-growing digital video marketplace. With the explosion of branded video across social and digital platforms and staggering proliferation of streaming services large and small, we think we have the right solution at the right time for this new video economy. And now, with the addition of Serge to lead the team, we have the right business leader to take the company to the next step. Welcome aboard, Serge!