Savveo

About Savveo

Savveo, Inc. operated as a provider of an advertising intelligence platform, which was founded in 2012 by Shafi Mustafa and Steve Villa. The company emerged as an evolution of OverstockAds.com, a portal for discounted advertising inventory also founded by Mustafa. The founders, both with backgrounds as ad agency executives, aimed to address the complexities they experienced firsthand in planning and executing local advertising campaigns. Mustafa previously served as a managing director at KEA Marketing & Advertising, while Villa brought experience as the former CEO of Muzak. They identified a significant inefficiency in the local advertising market, where businesses and agencies lacked a single, consolidated view of available media outlets.

The firm was established to create an online marketplace for the traditional media buying process, targeting a market valued at approximately $445 billion globally at the time. Savveo's platform was designed to provide businesses and advertising agencies with a tool to identify, compare, purchase, and track advertising campaigns across various traditional channels. These channels included out-of-home, print, radio, and television, as well as sponsorships and other non-traditional media. The core of its business model was to offer actionable intelligence on a wide array of advertising inventory, streamlining the ad buying process for its users and driving efficiencies for media companies.

In August 2012, Savveo secured $2 million in a Series A funding round from investors including BayCrest Capital. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, with development offices in Silicon Valley, the company aimed to simplify a fragmented market. After its operational period, Savveo was acquired by Empower MediaMarketing on March 31, 2015, and is now considered a deadpooled or inactive company.