An Irish ad-tech startup that most of the outdoor industry had not heard of a year ago has just closed a €1.9 million (US$2.2 million) seed round, led by a group of Irish angel investors with backing from Enterprise Ireland. Shinka, founded in Dublin in 2024, is building what it calls an agnostic mediation layer for video advertising – and its founders believe the biggest immediate opportunity sits in digital out-of-home.
The problem Shinka is actually solving
Mediation is a familiar concept in mobile apps and connected TV. A publisher plugs in a layer that sits between its inventory and multiple demand sources, runs a real-time auction for each impression, and routes the slot to whichever buyer pays most. It is standard plumbing in those channels. In DOOH it barely exists.
Outdoor screens, even the sophisticated ones, are still largely sold through manual bookings, fixed loops and direct deals negotiated weeks in advance. The screen runs what was booked; if a slot goes unfilled, or a campaign underdelivers, the inventory is simply wasted or made good later. Shinka’s proposition is that every impression on a digital screen should be auctioned in real time across several demand partners, with the media owner seeing transparent reporting rather than a monthly reconciliation.
Founder and chief executive Kieran Greene put the case plainly: “Mediation transformed how mobile apps monetise more than a decade ago, and programmatic trading did the same for Connected TV. OOH has gone digital, but it’s still traded on legacy technology and manual bookings. Shinka has been built so any media owner can plug in and let the technology do the work.”
Why a 2024 startup with 20 employees can matter
Greene spent seven years at Google before founding Shinka, working on stakeholder management, data-driven decision-making and operational efficiency. That background explains the company’s positioning: it is not selling creative technology or a new screen format, it is selling yield. A media owner with 200 screens and three demand partners currently has to decide, manually, which campaign runs in which loop. A mediation layer makes that decision per impression and per second.
The funding will be used to grow the team, deepen integrations with demand partners, and expand into the US and APAC markets. Enterprise Ireland’s Amanda Ward framed the round as typical of the agency’s remit – founder-led, built on sector expertise, global from day one – while Crowley Millar acted as legal counsel.
The hard part: DOOH’s inventory is not standardised
Mediation works when impressions are comparable. In mobile and CTV they broadly are: a defined ad slot, a defined duration, a defined audience signal. In DOOH they are not. A 48-sheet in a suburban retail park, a portrait 6-sheet on a high street, a full-motion screen in a pub and a pump-top display at a fuel station are sold on completely different logics, with different creative specs, different dwell assumptions and different proof-of-play conventions.
That fragmentation is precisely why manual booking persists, and it is also why a mediation layer is harder to build in outdoor than in any other channel. Shinka’s bet is that enough of the market has converged on standard digital formats – and enough demand-side platforms now accept DOOH inventory – that the remaining friction is commercial rather than technical. If that bet is right, the company’s addressable market is every independent media owner too small to build its own auction infrastructure.
What media owners should ask before signing up
The first question is control. A mediation layer that routes impressions to the highest bidder can cannibalise premium direct deals if the floor prices are set badly. The second is data ownership: who sees the impression-level reporting, and can the media owner export it into its own planning tools. The third is creative governance – automated routing has to respect the approval rules that many markets impose on public screens, a lesson Egypt’s 26 July Corridor incident made very visible this month.
The fourth question is the one every yield technology eventually faces: if every screen in a city is auctioned in real time, does the clearing price rise, or does transparent competition simply compress margins that were previously protected by opacity? Mediation historically increased publisher revenue by widening demand, not by raising prices on the same buyers – and there is no reason to assume outdoor will behave differently.
Why it matters, in one line
Shinka’s seed round is the first serious money behind a simple claim – that DOOH’s remaining growth is a plumbing problem, not an inventory problem – and if it is right, the next two years of outdoor technology competition will be fought over auction layers rather than screens.
Source: DailyDOOH, “Dublin Based Shinka Raise €1.9M Seed Round”, 9 November 2026.
