C1X ropes in Pawan Setpal as VP & Head of Business for MEA

C1X Inc has announced that it has hired its first employee in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) for their subsidiary, C1X MEA LLC. Pawan Setpal joins as Vice President & Head of Business for the region. He will be based in Dubai out of their Media City Office.

Setpal was last Director of Sales & Head Of Programmatic at Clique Media, prior to which he was Agency Business Director with Yahoo ME. He had started his career with Maktoob.com (acquired by Yahoo).

The dynamics of business in MEA is very different to several other parts of the world and with an early traction in programmatic full stack offering C1X is looking to capture this market given the set of offerings it has through its break through header bidding technology, which enables transparency and accuracy for brands and higher yield for publishers. The fast growing MEA market is pegged at around $400 million and is expected to grow at 22 per cent in 2017.

Commenting on Setpal’s appointment, Rammohan Sundaram, MD & SVP – APMEA, said, “Pawan is one of the successful early evangelist in the MEA market and for us, the product needs adoption for it to succeed, which is the sole reason why we were looking for someone with in depth knowledge of how various dynamics of the eco-system functions thus by educating everyone in the subject matter on programmatic advertising. His vast experience around supply and demand helps us in positioning our company given we are the only architecture in the space that has solutions across DSP, SSP, Ecommerce and Ad-serving all in one stack and fully programmatic.”

C1X recently announced its Series B funding led by Venture Labo Investments, Japan and has raised $14 million since 2015. Its unique header bidding technology and audience discovery are some of the key aspects for its success and is now expanding globally after its success in US and Japan in particular.

On his new role, Setpal said, “MEA is in its nascent stage of digital revolution as compared to other markets worldwide, which is even more the reason for bringing in the right technology that will help marketers, agencies and publishers. We will have a clear first mover advantage through our differentiated offering in a full stack environment and I am very excited about the opportunity that lies ahead of us. Our e-commerce solution is revolutionary and benefits not just the sellers in a marketplace environment, but creates a completely new revenue line for the platform owners. My immediate goal is to build the team and get cracking on supply that our platform will then filter out to create the premiums from the audience that are being discovered.”

C1X not only offers guaranteed buys, but also RTB for non-guaranteed inventory with audience discovery being the key. C1X has offices in Santa Clara, Omaha, New York, Singapore, Tokyo, and Dubai, with development centers in Chennai and Bangalore.