Amazon Web Services' second annual startup challenge awarded top spot to Boulder, CO-based Yieldex, a service which helps online publishers manage premium ad inventory and optimize campaign allocation. CEO Tom Shields said that he had no idea "what kind of capacity we were going to need" when Yieldex started, but AWS has allowed them to scale tremendously well. The win comes as "a great validation of our fantastic technical team," he says.
Seven finalists presented their companies in Seattle to a group of Amazon execs and VCs. As first prize winner, Yieldex walks away (on a cloud... har har) with $50,000 cash and $50,000 to use on Amazon web services. The company may also take some comfort in knowing that last year's winner Ooyala secured $8.5 million in its second round of funding shortly after winning the honour.
The other finalists included Encoding.com, Knewton, MedCommons, Sonian, Pixily, and Zephyr.
Yieldex was founded in 2007 by industry veterans from Matchlogic and NetGravity to address publishers' growing needs for accurate forecasting of... [more]
