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Rocket Fuel Named #4 on Forbes Most Promising Companies in America List

REDWOOD CITY, CA — (Marketwire) — 02/06/13 — Rocket Fuel Inc., the leading provider of artificial intelligence advertising solutions for digital marketers, today announced that it has been awarded #4 on Forbes Magazine-s America-s Most Promising Companies list. From thousands of applicants across dozens of sectors, Rocket Fuel was named the fourth most promising company in the United States.

The Forbes list of America-s Most Promising Companies features 100 privately held up-and-comers across all industries with compelling business models, strong management teams, notable customers, strategic partners and precious investment capital. Rocket Fuel is #4 on the list this year, up from its place of #22 last year.

Based on strong demand for its programmatic media-buying technology, Rocket Fuel attained record revenue of $107 million and more than doubled headcount to nearly 300 employees in 2012. Rocket Fuel also increased annual revenue by 138%, and the number of new advertisers increased by 93%.

Rocket Fuel worked with 894 brands around the world in 2012, including Allstate, BMW, and Lufthansa. Craig Koeslter, Account Supervisor for Mindshare on the Lufthansa account, noted that “Rocket Fuel-s results are so impressive that we-ve increased our budget with them each quarter.”

Rocket Fuel also expanded nationally and overseas in 2012, opening six new offices including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Hamburg, Raleigh-Durham, Toronto, and Washington DC, to bring total locations worldwide to 15. Rocket Fuel entered the Japanese programmatic-buying market through an alliance with Japan-s largest digital marketing company, cyber communications inc. (cci), a wholly owned subsidiary of Dentsu.

Also in 2012, Rocket Fuel raised $50 million in new financing in June, bringing total funding to $76M+. The company will use the funding to continue expansion and technology development, and plans to hire 300 more employees in 2013.

“To be named one of the top five most promising companies in America is a testament to the hard work of the entire Rocket Fuel team to bring artificial intelligence and big data to advertising,” said George John, CEO of Rocket Fuel. “It-s an honor to be recognized by Forbes for our contribution to the economy, and to deliver on the promise of American innovation and entrepreneurship.”

One metric never says it all. For the Most Promising list, Forbes strove for a holistic gauge of young, privately held companies, trying to pin down their trajectories by looking at a slew of variables. Over the course of six months Forbes reviewed thousands of applications. The final assessment is based on growth (both in sales and hiring), quality of management team and investors, margins, market size, and key partnerships. Forbes turned to CB Insights, a Manhattan-based data research firm that specializes in assessing private companies, to refine the search. Their MOSAIC software scans 45,000 sources to measure a company-s health. A new distribution deal, for example, marks a positive signal, while the loss of an executive is a negative. MOSAIC gathers those myriad signals into a final score that Forbes uses as an initial guide in producing the list. After verifying sales numbers, speaking with each company, and debating their merits and blemishes, Forbes produces a final ranking.

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Rocket Fuel delivers the only programmatic media-buying platform at big data scale that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to improve marketing ROI. Rocket Fuel-s powerful Advertising That Learns technology drives best-in-plan results for advertisers, and empowers media teams to focus on strategy, not spreadsheets. Its distributed planet-scale computing engine currently screens over 26 billion ads per day, and selects the best for its customers, via real-time bidding (RTB) relationships with major publishers and exchanges. The technique has proven itself across web, mobile, video, and social channels, with 894 brands powered by Rocket Fuel in 2012. Awarded #4 on Forbes- 2013 Most Promising Companies in America list, Rocket Fuel was founded by online advertising veterans and rocket scientists from NASA, Yahoo!, Salesforce.com, and DoubleClick. Rocket Fuel currently employs over 300 people in 15 offices worldwide including New York, London, Toronto, and Hamburg, and recently formed a strategic alliance with cci to provide its services in Japan.