One decade after retiring from the AFL, former Adelaide ruckman Brad Moran has sold his a start-up company for a whopping sum.
Former Adelaide Crows ruckman Brad Moran has sold his four-year-old start-up software company for $205 million.
As reported by The Advertiser, CitrusAd was sold to French multinational advertising and public relations firm Publicis Groupe earlier this year for a whopping nine-figure sum — which was approximately 100 times more than what Moran made in his football career.
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Launched in December 2017 by Moran and Adelaide-based business partner Nick Paech, CitrusAd enables retailers to charge brands a premium for the best product placements on their online stores.
The technology essentially serves as a back-end auction where brands can bid to have their products show up in online banner ads.
The online advertising search engine has secured the services of Woolworths, Coles and Dan Murphy’s in Australia, along with Tesco in the UK and Target in the US.
“What we learned after talking to the grocers for a long time was that they used to make a lot of their money from the eye-line shelf space,” Moran said, as reported by The Advertiser.
“And so we basically decided to build the digital version of that — a system where the retailer could allow their suppliers like Unilever and Coke and Pepsi to bid like they would on Google for the top spots on Google, but for the top spots on woolworths.com or coles.com.
“There was a lot more focus on online towards the back half of last year and there was a lot of focus around how do we make online profitable.
“Naturally they started to look for monetising solutions and things that could bring them advertising revenue to offset the cost of the growing the online presence.”
CitrusAd faced an uncertain future when the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the Australian business landscape, but investor MA Financial followed through with funding throughout 2020 to help increase the company’s revenue by more than 10 times over an 18-month period.
Moran played 21 AFL games for North Melbourne and Adelaide before injury forced a premature retirement in 2011, aged 24.
But the ex-footballer described his shock retirement as a “sliding doors” moment in his business career.
“Would I have liked to play another 10 years, maybe, but I look back now and probably think it’s the best thing that’s happened,” he said.
“I heavily lent on the club to help springboard me into business. Rob Chapman was the very first person I went to about my first business idea and he helped set me on the train to meet various others individuals across town.
“The footy club had a really influential and pivotal moment in the journey of my business career.”