Spotad, a New York City-based mobile advertising startup with an artificial-intelligence twist, announced today that it has raised $3.5 million in a Series A funding led by VLTCM in Hong Kong.

Plenty of advertising platforms track ad performance with metrics like reach and engagement, but Spotad claims that its AI, nicknamed Sarah, takes things a step further by telling brands how their ads will perform before they even buy them.

According to Spotad’s website, Sarah can “predict when and where a user is most likely to take action when an ad is presented.” The AI’s machine learning algorithms use real-time data to help brands pick choose what ads to buy, what audiences they should target and so on. The company says that its service processes more than 1 million ad auctions per second on high-volume platforms such as Google AdX, Baidu and Rubicon.

In addition to today’s funding announcement, Spotad also revealed that it will be the first Western demand-side platform, or DSP, to enter China, which boasts a mobile user base of more than 1 billion people. According to Yoav Oz (pictured), chief operations officer and co-founder of Spotad, the expansion into China did not come easy, and the move posed both cultural and technical challenges for the company.

“The first step for us was having Western clients who wanted to advertise in China,” Oz told VentureBeat. “Our second step was to get the supply side (exchanges) to work with us, and at the same time, we worked to secure the necessary government licenses (it took one year to get everything that was needed).”

In addition to Spotad’s expansion into China, the company also has plans to move into other Asian countries with strong mobile markets, including Japan, South Korea and India.

Image courtesy of Spotads