Vilnius-based RedTrack is a service that consolidates, analyzes and manages advertising data from all sites and offices in one service. In October, the startup raised $3.2 million in a Series A funding round led by Lead Ventures to strengthen the product team, accelerate AI development, and expand into the US market.
In the Startup of the Day column, Vladyslav Zhovtenko, CEO and co-founder of RedTrack, shares more details about the startup’s idea, its product, and future plans.
The Startup of the Day column on AIN is dedicated to tech projects from all sectors that originate from the CEE countries. If you would like to introduce your project, please fill in the questionnaire.
Tell us about your startup. How does it work?
RedTrack is an AI-driven automation and analytics platform for e-commerce media buyers. With RedTrack’s help they are able to make smarter decisions and scale their ad campaigns to grow revenue. Our platform connects seamlessly with Facebook, TikTok, Google, Shopify, and more, giving media buyers a full view of campaign performance in one interface. Media buyers face a chaotic array of choices when looking at where to spend their money, especially with media buyers in SMEs. With RedTrack, they can avoid wasting budget on ineffective ads and scale up the ones that work. Our automation turns insights into actions using AI-driven benchmarks, so marketers can focus on strategy and creativity, rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks where mistakes are often made.
How did you come up with the startup’s idea? What was the reason/motivation behind it?
As a digital marketing veteran (hard to believe, but I've been around since the late 1990s when the internet was just taking off), I really wanted to create something different. Working across various marketing companies, I came to see the importance of aligning media buying, automation, analytics back in 2004 —before Facebook even existed! Back then, we were scaling with basic tools like Excel, building solutions for problems as they came up. But there were no databases or advanced tools that could fully support what digital marketing was becoming.
Starting in 2011, I helped companies improve lead generation and ad tech, developing digital sales and marketing strategies that would support long-term growth. Then, in 2015, I co-founded AdxGeeks, a programmatic media-buying solution, which eventually led to co-founding RedTrack in 2019.
The RedTrack story itself started when I teamed up with Vladimir Vassilevski, a venture builder with investment banking experience, and Artem Shpakov, our CTO, who leads our tech development. Our mission is to help media buyers be efficient in their daily work by simplifying complex tasks and reducing human error.
How long did it take to reach the prototype or MVP? What did you encounter?
RedTrack platform was initially launched in 2019, but this journey has been far from a typical success story. We didn’t experience overnight growth. Instead, it’s taken us nearly three years of hard work, strategic changes, and persistence to reach a stable position and one more year to remind the market of our presence.
The mistake we made from the start was doing too many things simultaneously without fully completing them. This rapidly increased the complexity of the product without delivering value for the customers. We eventually realised we hadn’t tailored our product enough and were spreading ourselves thin, particularly as we were focused on affiliates. Just as we identified solutions, the war in February 2022 disrupted everything, halting fundraising and hiring, which left us in a tough spot.
To streamline our product and focus on what clients truly valued, I spoke directly with over 200 clients. With support from our investors, we hung on, and by early 2023, things began to shift. After that, we finally saw a significant boost in MRR, giving us the momentum to approach investors again with confidence. Thus, we entered 2024 with a focused product, big goals, and a clear understanding of our potential for future development.
When exactly did you launch your product? Or when the launch is planned?
Our platform has been live for over five years, and we’re constantly enhancing it.
Tell us about the stratup’s business model. How do you monetize your product?
RedTrack is a SaaS with several subscription plans, designed as a complete solution for specific customer segments. We are also disrupting existing business models in media buying automation by offering it at a fixed subscription fee, rather than as a percentage of ad spend. This way, our customers know exactly what they’re paying each month, without the surprise of escalating fees tied to ad budgets.
What are your target markets and consumers?
Our clients are performance-focused media buyers, especially in the e-commerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) space. We also work with many affiliate marketing agencies who are handling dozens or hundreds of ad accounts for their own clients. We care about media buyers who want to drive conversions and sales.
It’s important to understand that media buying management is all about making adjustments—whether it’s tweaking bids and budgets, introducing new creatives, or testing different strategies. Digital media buyers often operate with limited budgets, requiring them to maximize the impact of every dollar spent. Productivity here is about allocating budgets to the most efficient channels, as indicated by the data.
However, managing campaigns across multiple platforms—like Facebook, Google, and TikTok—has become challenging due to data mismatches, especially with changes like iOS 14 and the shift to GA4. These media buyers need a unified view of their data to see exactly what’s working. RedTrack gives them a full picture of campaign performance in one interface, allowing them to cut ineffective ads and scale up the successful ones. Our platform doesn’t just provide insights; it allows users to implement changes directly, saving time by avoiding multiple logins. For larger campaigns, our automation offers industry benchmarks and insights to help boost underperforming ads and scale successful ones. We are currently working on a feature where, if a client’s campaign has a 20% ROI, then the platform will compare that directly to industry benchmarks to see how it measures up.
We designed our platform with a plug-and-play approach, so our clients can easily connect their accounts and start collecting data right away. While big companies can afford to build complex in-house solutions, mid-market and SMB companies don’t often have those resources. That’s where we come in—our proprietary cloud solution and API integrations allow us to deliver enterprise-level data processing and analytics at pricing SMBs can manage. It’s simple: clients just connect their website and channels, and we handle the rest.
If the startup has already launched the product, what are the results: metrics, income, or any clear indicators that can be evaluated.
As of October, RedTrack is proud to serve nearly 850 businesses across 100+ countries. While most of our clients are based in the U.S. and Canada, we’re also growing quickly in the European Union and the UK. Location doesn’t matter to us or our clients—we’re here to support businesses wherever they are. We also have a strong client base in Brazil, India and Australia and are excited to keep expanding! Based on our calculations, our platform helps clients manage over 60,000 ad accounts, generating more than $2 billion in revenue.
What about your team? How many people are working in the startup? If you’re looking for new employees, indicate whom exactly.
Right now, we have a team of 45 talented people, with a big portion of that growth happening this year. Our main office is in Vilnius, Lithuania, but we’re legally a U.S.-based company with several branches across the EU. In a nutshell, we’re a highly remote company, with team members spread across the globe, even in India. Currently, we’re focused on growing our development team. Our goal is to at least double its size, and we’re getting close to making that happen.
Have you already raised any investments? Provide us with more details on each funding round: the amount, investors, the purpose of the investment.
So far, we’ve raised a little over $5 million, with $3.2 million coming from our latest Series A round this October. LeadVentures led the round, with InstaVC, IronWolf Capital, and angel investor Balazs Gandera also participating. The new funds will help us build up our product team and speed up AI product development, as well as capitalize on existing inroads into the U.S. market.
What's next? Tell us about your future plans.
We focus on analytics and automation. However, we see RedTrack as a tool that boosts the productivity of media-buying teams.
Our next big step is building out a suite of AI-driven features. AI, by its nature, is also a productivity booster. With the two combined, we expect to deliver significant productivity gains. By combining advanced automation with powerful analytics and affordability, we’re rethinking what digital marketing can do.
