Shinka Raises 1.9 Million Euros to Bring App-Style Ad Mediation to Digital Out-of-Home Screens

Shinka, a Dublin ad tech startup, closed a €1.9 million seed round on November 5. A group of Irish angel investors led, with Enterprise Ireland backing it. The money is small. The idea behind it is one that has already reshaped mobile app advertising and hasn’t reached screens in petrol stations, malls and transit yet.

That idea is mediation. In mobile apps, a mediation layer sits between the publisher and every ad network and exchange that wants its impressions. For each slot it runs a quick auction across all of them and gives the impression to whoever pays most. App developers stopped choosing one network and started letting demand compete. Fill rates and prices went up.

Why out-of-home is behind

Digital out-of-home has gone digital in hardware and much less in how it’s sold. A lot of screen time is still booked by hand, in direct deals, and filled from whichever sell-side platform the media owner signed with. Programmatic DOOH exists, but a screen network usually plugs into one or two platforms, and the ad server that picks the winner is often run by a company that also sells demand. Kieran Greene, Shinka’s founder and a seven-year Google veteran, says the medium went digital but still trades on legacy technology and manual bookings.

Shinka runs the auction outside the ad server, as a neutral layer between the screen owner and every demand source. The company’s argument is that this removes the conflict of interest when the party picking the winner also sells one of the bids. Media owners get automatic fill from several sources and real-time reporting where they used to have insertion orders. It works for connected TV as well.

What a media owner should ask

Shinka’s named customer is Gas Station TV in the US. The company was founded in 2024, and the round pays for hiring, deeper links to demand partners and expansion into the US and Asia-Pacific. One forecast cited with the round puts digital at 49% of worldwide out-of-home ad revenue in 2026. If that holds, the share sold through automated auctions will decide a lot of what a screen is worth.

For an agency or brand, mediation means more out-of-home inventory you can buy the way you buy CTV and display, with impression-level pricing. For screen owners the test is simple. Run mediation on part of the network for a quarter and compare effective CPMs and fill against direct-sold screens. A shift of a few points is the business case, and the place where a €1.9 million company has to prove itself.