Amendment No. 1 to confidential draft submission

As submitted confidentially to the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2021 pursuant to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012. This draft registration statement has not been publicly filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and all information herein remains strictly confidential.

Registration No. 333-                

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM S-1

REGISTRATION STATEMENT

UNDER

THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933

Integral Ad Science Holding LLC

to be converted as described herein to a corporation named

Integral Ad Science Holding Corp.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

95 Morton St., 8th Floor

New York, NY 10014

Telephone: (646) 278-4871

(Address, including zip code, and telephone number, including

area code, of registrant’s principal executive offices)

Lisa Utzschneider

Integral Ad Science Holding Corp.

Chief Executive Officer

95 Morton St., 8th Floor

New York, NY 10014

(646) 278-4871

(Name, address, including zip code, and telephone number, including area code, of agent for service)

Copies of all communications, including communications sent to agent for service, should be sent to:

Approximate date of commencement of proposed sale to the public:

As soon as practicable after this Registration Statement becomes effective.

If any of the securities being registered on this Form are to be offered on a delayed or continuous basis pursuant to Rule 415 under the Securities Act of 1933, check the following box:  ☐

If this Form is filed to registered additional securities for an offering pursuant to Rule 462(b) under the Securities Act, please check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering.  ☐

If this Form is a post-effective amendment filed pursuant to Rule 462(c) under the Securities Act, check the following box and list the Securities act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering.  ☐

If this Form is a post-effective amendment filed pursuant to Rule 462(d) under the Securities Act, check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering.  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 7(a)(2)(B) of the Securities Act. ☐

The registrant hereby amends this Registration Statement on such date or dates as may be necessary to delay its effective date until the registrant shall file a further amendment which specifically states that this Registration Statement shall thereafter become effective in accordance with Section 8(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 or until this Registration Statement shall become effective on such date as the Securities and Exchange Commission, acting pursuant to said Section 8(a), may determine.

EXPLANATORY NOTE

Integral Ad Science Holding LLC, the registrant whose name appears on the cover of this registration statement, is a Delaware limited liability company. The registrants prior name was Kavacha Topco, LLC and, effective February 23, 2021, the registrant’s name was changed to Integral Ad Science Holding LLC. Immediately prior to effectiveness of this registration statement, Integral Ad Science Holding LLC intends to convert into a Delaware corporation pursuant to a statutory conversion and change its name to Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. as described in the section titled “Corporate Conversion” of the accompanying prospectus. In the accompanying prospectus, we refer to all of the transactions related to our conversion to a corporation as the Corporate Conversion. As a result of the Corporate Conversion, the members of Integral Ad Science Holding LLC will become holders of shares of common stock of Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. Unless the context otherwise requires, all references in the accompanying prospectus to the “Company,” “Integral Ad Science Holding Corp.,” “IAS,” “we,” “us,” “our,” or similar terms refer to Integral Ad Science Holding LLC and its consolidated subsidiaries before the Corporate Conversion, and Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. and, where appropriate, its subsidiaries after the Corporate Conversion.

The term “Vista” or “our Sponsor” refers to Vista Equity Partners, our equity sponsor, and the term “Vista Funds” refers to Vista Equity Partners Fund VI, L.P. (“VEPF VI”), Vista Equity Partners Fund VI-A, L.P. (“VEPF VI-A”), and VEPF VI FAF, L.P. (“VEPF FAF”).

Except as disclosed in the prospectus, the consolidated financial statements and selected historical consolidated financial data and other financial information included in this registration statement are those of Integral Ad Science Holding LLC and its subsidiaries and do not give effect to the Corporate Conversion. Shares of common stock of Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. are being offered by the accompanying prospectus. We do not expect that the Corporate Conversion will have a material effect on the results of our core operations.

The information in this preliminary prospectus is not complete and may be changed. These securities may not be sold until the registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is effective. This preliminary prospectus is not an offer to sell nor does it seek an offer to buy these securities in any jurisdiction where the offer or sale is not permitted.

Subject to Completion, dated                 , 2021

            Shares

COMMON STOCK

This is an initial public offering of shares of common stock of Integral Ad Science Holding Corp.

Prior to this offering, there has been no public market for our common stock. It is currently estimated that the initial public offering price per share will be between $             and $            . We intend to apply to list our common stock on the                  under the symbol “                .”

We are an “emerging growth company” as defined under the federal securities laws, and as such, we have elected to comply with certain reduced reporting requirements for this prospectus and may elect to do so in future filings.

See “Risk Factors” beginning on page 18 to read about factors you should consider before buying shares of our common stock.

Immediately after this offering, assuming an offering size as set forth above, funds controlled by our equity sponsor, Vista Equity Partners, will own approximately         % of our outstanding common stock (or         % of our outstanding common stock if the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares is exercised in full). As a result, we expect to be a “controlled company” within the meaning of the corporate governance standards of the                 . See “Management—Corporate Governance—Controlled Company Status.”

Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor any other regulatory body has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of this prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense.

We have granted the underwriters the right to purchase up to an additional                  shares of our common stock at the initial public offering price less the underwriting discount.

The underwriters expect to deliver the shares of common stock against payment in New York, New York on                 , 2021.

Prospectus dated                , 2021

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Neither we nor any of the underwriters have authorized anyone to provide any information or make any representations other than those contained in this prospectus or in any free writing prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). Neither we nor any of the underwriters take any responsibility for, and can provide no assurance as to the reliability of, any other information that others may give you. We are offering to sell, and seeking offers to buy, shares of common stock only in jurisdictions where offers and sales are permitted. The information contained in this prospectus is accurate only as of the date of this prospectus, regardless of the time of delivery of this prospectus or of any sale of our common stock. Our business, financial condition, results of operations, and prospects may have changed since such date.

For investors outside of the United States, neither we nor any of the underwriters have done anything that would permit this offering or possession or distribution of this prospectus in any jurisdiction where action for that purpose is required, other than in the United States. You are required to inform yourselves about, and to observe any restrictions relating to, this offering and the distribution of this prospectus outside of the United States.

Through and including                 , 2021 (the 25th day after the date of this prospectus), all dealers effecting transactions in these securities, whether or not participating in this offering, may be required to deliver a prospectus. This is in addition to a dealer’s obligation to deliver a prospectus when acting as an underwriter and with respect to an unsold allotment or subscription.

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RISK FACTORS

This offering and an investment in our common stock involve a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks described below, together with the financial and other information contained in this prospectus, before you decide to purchase shares of our common stock. If any of the following risks actually occurs, our business, financial condition, results of operations, cash flows and prospects could be materially and adversely affected. As a result, the trading price of our common stock could decline and you could lose all or part of your investment in our common stock.

Risks Related to COVID-19

Economic downturns and market conditions beyond our control, including as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, could materially adversely affect our business, operating results, financial condition and prospects.

Our business depends on global economic conditions, the overall demand for global digital advertising spending and on the economic health of customers that benefit from our platform. Unstable market conditions make it difficult for our customers and us to accurately forecast and plan future business activities, and could cause our customers to reduce or delay their spending with us. Economic downturns or unstable market conditions may cause customers to decrease their marketing and advertising budgets, which could reduce spending through our platform and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. As we explore new countries to expand our business, economic downturns or unstable market conditions in any of those countries could result in our investments not yielding the returns we anticipate.

Presently, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in severe market disruptions and a global economic slowdown for certain goods and services. The severity, magnitude and duration of the current COVID-19 pandemic is uncertain and rapidly changing. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in governmental authorities implementing numerous measures to try to contain the virus, such as travel bans and restrictions, quarantines, shelter in place orders, and shutdowns. These measures have impacted and may further impact all or portions of our facilities, workforce, and operations, the behavior of our end consumers and the operations of our respective vendors and suppliers. While these measures have not had a material adverse impact on our results of operations to date, our results of operations could be materially adversely affected in the future if such measures were to continue or new measures are imposed. For example, additional countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom (the “U.K.”), and France, among others, have recently gone back into lockdown, implemented curfews or increased further nationwide restrictions over concerns of increasing COVID transmission rates. Concern over the impact of COVID-19 may delay the purchasing decisions of certain prospective customers and/or cause them to consider purchasing solutions than originally anticipated. While governmental authorities have taken measures to try to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, there is considerable uncertainty regarding such measures and potential future measures. There is no certainty that measures taken by governmental authorities will be sufficient to mitigate the risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic or to prevent a resurgence in the infection rates, and there is uncertainty regarding the effectiveness of the vaccines against new strains or variants of COVID-19 and the general availability of COVID-19 vaccines, which could impact our ability to perform critical functions.

In response to disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have implemented a number of measures designed to protect the health and safety of our workforce and position us to maintain our healthy financial position. These measures include restrictions on business travel, the institution of work-from-home policies and the implementation of strategies for workplace safety at our facilities to the limited extent that they remain open and our employees need to access them. We are following the guidance from local public health officials and government agencies with respect to such facilities, including implementation of enhanced cleaning measures, social distancing guidelines, and wearing of masks. We will continue to incur increased costs for our operations during this pandemic that are difficult to predict with certainty. In particular, our remote work arrangements for employees, coupled with stay-at-home orders and quarantines, pose challenges for those employees and our IT

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systems, and extended periods of remote work arrangements could strain our business continuity plans, introduce operational risk, including cybersecurity and IT systems management risks. As a result, our business, results of operations, cash flows, or financial condition may be affected by COVID-19 related disruptions and could continue to be adversely impacted in the future. There is no assurance the measures we have taken or may take in the future will be successful in managing the uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we may (i) decide to postpone or cancel planned investments in our business in response to changes in our business, or (ii) experience difficulties in recruiting or retaining personnel, each of which may impact our ability to respond to our customers’ needs and fulfill contractual obligations. In addition, we rely upon third parties for certain critical inputs to our business and platform, such as data integrations with proprietary platforms, data centers, and technology infrastructure. Any disruptions to services provided to us by third parties that we rely upon to provide our platform, including as a result of COVID-19 or other actions outside of our control, could significantly impact the continued performance of our platform.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also significantly increased economic and demand uncertainty globally, as well as record levels of unemployment in the U.S. As a result, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an economic slowdown, and it is possible that it could cause a global recession. This economic uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic has and could again lead to a general decrease in consumer spending and decrease in consumer confidence. More specifically, COVID-19 has already and could (i) continue to cause advertisers to pause advertising spending due to market uncertainty, (ii) require advertisers to reposition messaging or (iii) cause reductions in overall advertising spending budgets. Our sales, results of operations and cash flows depend on the overall demand for our platform. Some of our customers have experienced and may continue to experience financial hardships that, to date, have resulted in minimal instances of delayed or uncollectible payments, though this could increase in the future. Additionally, certain industry sectors that comprise part of our client base and spend heavily on advertising, such as travel and entertainment, may see prolonged financial difficulty that may result in further delays or reductions in advertising spending. To add to the uncertainty, the pace and nature of any economic recovery is unclear after this unprecedented shutdown of the economy. As a result, we may be susceptible to increased customer churn as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The severity, magnitude, and duration of the current COVID-19 pandemic is uncertain, rapidly changing and hard to predict and depends on events beyond our knowledge or control. These and other impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic could have the effect of heightening many of the other risks described in this “Risk Factors” section, such as those relating to our reputation, product sales, results of operations, or financial condition. We might not be able to predict or respond to all impacts on a timely basis to prevent near- or long-term adverse impacts to our results. As a result, we cannot at this time predict the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic with certainty, but it could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition, and cash flows.

Risks Relating to Our Business and Strategy

Our revenue and results of operations are highly dependent on the overall demand for advertising. Factors that affect the amount of advertising spending, such as economic downturns, instability in political or market conditions generally, and any changes in tax treatment of advertising expenses, can make it difficult to predict our revenue and could adversely affect our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

Our business depends on the overall demand for advertising and on the economic health of our current and prospective advertiser and publisher customers. Various macroeconomic factors could cause advertisers to reduce their advertising budgets, including adverse economic conditions and general uncertainty about economic recovery or growth, particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia, where we do most of our business; instability in political or market conditions generally; and any changes in tax treatment of advertising expenses and the deductibility thereof. Generally, the U.S. and other key international economies have been affected from

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time to time by falling demand for a variety of goods and services, restricted credit, poor liquidity, reduced corporate profitability, volatility in credit, equity and foreign exchange markets, bankruptcies, and overall uncertainty with respect to the economy, including with respect to tariff and trade issues. In particular, the economies of countries in Europe have been experiencing weakness associated with high sovereign debt levels, weakness in the banking sector, uncertainty over the future of the Eurozone and volatility in the value of the pound sterling and the Euro, including any instability possibly caused by the implementation of the withdrawal agreement for Brexit, which went into effect on January 1, 2021. We have operations, as well as current and potential new customers, throughout most of Europe. If economic conditions in Europe and other key markets for our platform continue to remain uncertain or deteriorate further, it could adversely affect our customers’ ability or willingness to utilize our platform, delay prospective customers’ purchasing decisions, and affect renewal rates, all of which could harm our operating results. Reductions in overall advertising spending as a result of these factors or the inability of advertisers to meet their commitments could make it difficult to predict our revenue and could adversely affect our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

If we fail to innovate and make the right investment decisions in our offerings and platform, including responding to technological changes or upgrading our technology systems, we may not attract new customers and retain customers and our revenue and results of operations may decline.

Our industry is subject to rapid and frequent changes in technology, evolving customer needs, and the frequent introduction by our competitors of new and enhanced offerings. We must constantly make investment decisions regarding offerings and technology to meet customer demands and evolving industry standards and our success depends on our ability to adapt and innovate. Examples of innovation and technological changes that we have had to manage include, for example: (i) developing solutions for measuring in a mobile and in-app context as consumers and advertisers shifted to these environments, (ii) developing the necessary integrations and data ingestion methods to provide verification services for Walled Gardens as this channel became a greater portion of digital ad spend, and (iii) innovating and investing into contextual capabilities to complement historical methods such as keyword based solutions. We may make wrong decisions regarding these investments. If new or existing competitors introduce new products and services using new technologies or if new industry standards and practices emerge, we may lose customers or customers may decrease their use of our platform. New customer demands, superior competitive offerings, or new industry standards could require us to make unanticipated and costly changes to our platform or business model. If we do not have sufficient capital to make these costly changes or to prioritize the research and development required to keep pace with the competition, our offerings may become obsolete and may cause a material adverse effect to our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

Even if we are able to meet the demands for these unanticipated and costly changes to our platform or business model, the impact of such rapid innovation could cause issues with integrating our new offerings and platform into our proprietary platforms’ solutions within a reasonable timeframe. We cannot assure you that our updated solutions will be compatible or accepted by our integration partners. Any delay or failure in integration may cause missing data or delays in data analysis, which could cause our customers to become dissatisfied with our services, cause a loss of customers and may adversely impact our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

If we fail to adapt to our rapidly changing industry or to evolving customer needs as priorities shift or keep pace with rapid technological developments, the solutions we deliver may become less marketable and less competitive. If we are unable to properly identify and prioritize appropriate solution development projects or if we fail to develop and effectively market new solutions or enhance existing solutions to address the needs of existing and new customers, we may not be able to achieve or maintain adequate market acceptance and penetration of our solutions, and our solutions may become less competitive or obsolete, demand for our platform could decrease and our business, financial condition, and operating results may be adversely affected.

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If our existing and future product offerings fail to maintain or achieve industry accreditation standards, customer acceptance of our products may decrease which could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

The market for our products is characterized by changes in protocols and evolving industry standards. Industry associations such as the Advertising Research Foundation, the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, the IAB, the TAG, the GARM, which is comprised of advertisers, agencies, media companies, platforms and industry organizations, the MRC, a voluntary trade organization, and internationally-based industry associations have independently initiated efforts to either review market research and rating methodologies across the media that we measure or develop minimum standards for such research and rating. Accreditation is only granted on a per metric basis rather than on a product or solution. In order to attain accreditation for new metrics tied to new solutions, the processes supporting new solutions must be reviewed to ensure that they are accurately processing data used to create the metrics. The process of obtaining such accreditations is costly, lengthy and there are often significant delays in achieving such accreditation. As a result, even if we are able to obtain such accreditations for our product offerings, we typically incur significant costs in obtaining such accreditations and the process of obtaining such accreditations delays our ability to market such product offerings as accredited by one or more industry associations. Moreover, metrics must be accredited before they will achieve widespread acceptance by the industry and our customers.

Additionally, these accreditation organizations could determine that there is a uniform standard that must be achieved by companies seeking accreditation, which could have the effect of limiting the methods of operations among competitors and could lead to commoditization of our industry and harm our ability to effectively compete by inhibiting our ability to differentiate our services from those of our competitors.

Failure to achieve accreditation for any of our product offerings, delays in obtaining such accreditations, or adverse audit findings may negatively impact the market acceptance of our products and could cause us to lose customers, and could delay acceptance of new product offerings by the industry and our customers. Meanwhile, successful accreditation or audits may lead to costly changes to our procedures and methodologies and may have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

If we are unable to provide digital or cross-platform analytics, or if our analytics are incomplete, our ability to maintain and grow our business may be harmed.

Our business provides buy-side post-buy verification and programmatic pre-bid solutions; on the sell-side, we provide verification and optimization solutions for publisher and media companies that enable the measurement and targeting of inventory against ad viewability, ad fraud, invalid traffic, brand safety, and suitability metrics across platforms, such as display, video, desktop, mobile, connected TV, open web, browser, in-app, and more.

If we are unable to gain or maintain access to information necessary to measure campaign performance, or if we unable to utilize such information in the development or enhancement of our programmatic pre-bid solutions or of our data sets and models, or if we are unable to do any of the foregoing on commercially reasonable terms, our ability to meet our customers’ demands and our business and financial performance may be harmed. Furthermore, even if we do have access to complete data covering channels such as display, video, connected TV, mobile and desktop, if we have insufficient technology, encounter challenges in our methodological approaches or inadequate source materials to parse the information across such channels or to do so in a cost-effective manner, our products may be inferior to other offerings, and we may be unable to meet our customers’ demands. In such an event, our business and financial performance may be harmed.

In particular, rather than being able to collect data directly from our technology (e.g., ad tags, pixels and SDKs) like we do on the open web, our ability to access data necessary for the measurement of campaigns with proprietary platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube among others, depends on our continued access to their

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proprietary platforms or certain segments of their proprietary platforms for research or measurement purposes. For example, we rely on Facebook and YouTube to provide us with access to mutually agreed upon data elements and signals for purposes of enabling the measurement and targeting of Facebook and YouTube inventory on behalf of advertisers. These proprietary platforms could limit our access to their data as a result of technologically changes or changes to their access terms. Moreover, while our contracts with these proprietary platforms generally renew automatically, many of our contracts with these proprietary platforms allow the platform to terminate their agreements with us without cause and subject to short notice periods. Such terminations would significantly limit our ability to access data that is necessary for the measurement of our advertiser customers’ respective campaigns within the relevant proprietary platforms. There can be no assurance that such proprietary platforms will not limit or terminate our access to their data in the future, whether for competitive or other reasons. Moreover, as display, video, connected TV, mobile, and desktop viewing continue to proliferate, gaining and maintaining cost-effective access to display, video, connected TV, mobile and desktop data is already and will continue to become increasingly critical, and we could face difficulty in accessing data relating to those platforms.

If we are unable to maintain our access to these proprietary platforms, establish access with new platforms, or otherwise acquire or access data that we need for research or measurement purposes effectively and efficiently, or if the cost of data acquisition increases, our business, financial condition, we may be unable to provide certain digital or cross-platform analytic and our results of operations could be materially and adversely affected.

We rely on integrations with advertising platforms, DSPs, proprietary platforms and ad servers, over which we exercise very little control.

Our business depends on our ability to integrate our solutions with a variety of third-party advertising platforms, DSPs, proprietary platforms and ad services. We have formed partnerships with these platforms to integrate our technology with their software and product offerings, allowing our customers to utilize our solutions wherever they purchase or place an ad. For example, we rely on integration with Google in order to provide automated tag wrapping functionalities. Google may deploy code or change operations that may impact joint solution and combined functionality, which would have a significant effect on our ability to offer our products. Some of these integration partners have significant market share in the segment in which they operate. To date, we have relied on written contracts to govern our relationships with these partners. However, these are subject to change by such providers from time to time and in many instances the provider may choose to terminate these contracts without cause and with short notice periods. Many of these agreements are short term with automatic renewal provisions, and there can be no assurances that such providers will agree to renew their agreements with us. Moreover, such providers may choose to stop integrating with our solutions and may unilaterally stop providing us with data necessary to our business if they acquire a competitor which provides services similar to ours or if they begin to deliver services similar to ours on their own. For example, regarding our data measurements services, a provider such as YouTube has established a formal measurement program through which participants need to be approved by Google in order to participate. YouTube could adversely impact our operations in the future by limiting our data access from their platform altogether, restricting access to data to only a select few vendors or taking away our certification within its measurement program. We cannot assure you that our existing integration partners will continue to, or that potential new integration partners will agree to, integrate our solutions. We also cannot assure you that our customers will continue to use our solutions available on these digital media platforms or that our integration partners will not develop and market products that compete with us in the future. Such integrations may not be replaceable, and so loss of any such integrations could materially impact our business and our results of operations and we may lose customers.

Even if our partners continue their agreements and partnerships with us, we continuously are required to update and enhance our solutions to adapt to changes in software, networking, browser, and database technologies. For example, we may be forced to make changes based on a unilateral change that an integration partner makes to its platform in order to integrate our products or to have the integration operate in the same

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manner that it did prior to the integration partner’s change. The integration partner’s change may cause a malfunction in the integration and cause a break in services. We cannot assure you that our updated solutions will be compatible or accepted by our integration partners.

Additionally, some of our partners are subject to regulatory actions, which, if successful, could cause our partners to be broken into separate companies. For example, Facebook has been sued by state prosecutors and federal regulators with allegations that the company is taking illegal actions to acquire rivals and stifle competition. If our partners and their products are separated into separate companies, it could have a material effect on our ability to gather data and there can be no assurance that all of the separated companies will continue to be our partner, each of which could materially affect our business, results of operations, and revenues.

Our business and revenues could also be affected by social issues or disruptions. For example, if there is public disapproval or boycotting of a specific platform, such as Facebook or other proprietary platforms, our ability to optimize ad placement or to forecast usage may be impacted based on unforeseen trends or events. Additionally, how we categorize specific sites in the course of our normal business operations could expose us to risks from publishers or advertisers who could disagree with our categorizations and incur negative ramifications if they believe their ads were monetarily contributing to websites that contribute to the spread of hate speech, disinformation, white supremacist activity, or voter suppression efforts, among other things. If publishers or advertisers believe our categorizations are faulty or unreliable, they may pull back on advertising, which could affect our business, revenues, and results of operations.

In addition, we rely on our DSP partners to report to us on the usage of our pre-bid and contextual targeting solutions on their platforms, as well as revenue generated on their platforms. The timing of these reports is fixed per DSP, and variations impact our ability to derive insights, particularly granular insights into usage, and potentially impacts our ability to accurately forecast. Any financial or other difficulties our integration partners face may negatively impact our business, as a significant portion of our revenue depends on customers using our solutions on these digital media platforms, and we are unable to predict the nature and extent of any such impact. We exercise very little control over our integration partners, which increases our vulnerability to problems with the services they provide and our reliance upon them for accurate data and revenue reporting. If our proprietary platform partners intentionally or unintentionally cause data delays or if data is missing, our reporting and ability to deliver our products and services would be adversely impacted and we would be unable to accurately forecast our revenue due to our inability to see the volume of impressions. Any errors, failures, interruptions, or delays experienced in connection with our integration partners could adversely affect our business, reputation, forecasts, and financial condition.

The market in which we participate is intensely competitive, both from established and new companies, and we may not be able to compete successfully with our current or future competitors.

We operate in a highly competitive and rapidly changing industry with barriers to entry being increasingly lowered and single-solution providers entering the market and competing with certain aspects of our solutions. We expect competition to persist and intensify in the future, which could harm our ability to increase revenue and maintain profitability. The market for measurement, data analytics, and verification of digital advertising is competitive and evolving rapidly as market participants develop and offer new products and services, which could lead to commoditization and harm our ability to effectively compete in our industry.

We compete with established verification and measurement companies such as DoubleVerify and Oracle’s MOAT and Grapeshot, as well as point solution (e.g., fraud) providers such as WhiteOps. These competitors may be able to, among other things, provide accurate and reliable data insights on brand suitability and existence of ad fraud, innovate, and adapt product offerings to emerging digital media technologies, offer solutions that meet changing customer needs, negotiate more favorable revenue share agreements with DSPs, and otherwise execute on their growth strategies more effectively than we can.

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We may also face competition from new companies entering the market, including large established companies and companies that we do not yet know about or do not yet exist. These companies may have massive resources (e.g., Oracle or Nielsen) to acquire or internally develop solutions that compete directly with ours. As we introduce new solutions, as our existing solutions evolve and as other companies introduce new products and solutions, we are likely to face additional competition. If existing or new companies develop, market, or resell competitive high-value products or services or if they acquire one of our existing competitors or form a strategic alliance with one of our competitors, our ability to compete effectively could be significantly compromised and our results of operations could be harmed. For example, if competitors like DoubleVerify were to be acquired by one of the larger proprietary platforms, the proprietary platforms that we rely upon to provide our services may limit our access to their platforms, refuse to integrate our products or, regarding our data measurements services, a provider such as YouTube could materially impact our operations by limiting our data access from their platform altogether. Relatedly, if the larger proprietary platforms that we rely upon for significant portions of our business, such as YouTube, were to develop and begin providing services similar to ours in-house, they may terminate our contracts and restrict our access to their data (which some proprietary platforms, including with respect to platforms that we rely upon for significant portions of our business, can do at any time without cause and with short notice periods), refuse to allow us to integrate with their products, and generally adversely affect our operations, revenues, and ability to conduct our operations. As of December 31, 2020, we had contracts with DSPs and proprietary platforms, including Google, Facebook, and The Trade Desk, that would individually or in the aggregate materially affect our revenue and results of operations if the contracts were terminated.

Our potential competitors may have significantly more financial, technical, marketing and other resources than we have, larger intellectual property portfolios and broader global distribution and presence, which may allow them to devote greater resources to the development, promotion, sale and support of their products and services. They may also have more extensive relationships than we have and may be better positioned to execute on product introductions or integration with proprietary platforms. Some of our competitors, such as Nielsen, may have a longer operating history and greater name recognition. As a result, these competitors may be better able to respond quickly to new technologies, develop deeper relationships, or offer services at lower prices. Any of these developments would make it more difficult for us to sell our platform and could result in increased pricing pressure, increased sales and marketing expense or the loss of market share, which could cause us to decrease the prices we charge or accept less favorable terms for our solutions in order to remain competitive. If we are unable to compete successfully against our current and future competitors, we may not be able to retain and/or increase sales to existing customers and acquire new customers, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.

We may be exposed to risk as a result of our third parties, and we may not be able to recover such losses from them.

We rely on integrations with advertising platforms, DSPs, proprietary platforms and ad servers, over which we exercise very little control. Issues surrounding our integrations may arise as a result of our or our partners’ systems. For example, a significant reduction in the volume of data received from an integration partner could prevent us from effectively providing services to our customers. Similarly, in the context of an ad server integration, ads may not be properly delivered to their intended webpages or applications due to an integration issue. These delays in data, ad delivery failures or the ability to integrate our products to partner platforms could impact customer satisfaction and prevent us from providing the services we are contractually obligated to provide. In addition, such delays and failures could delay our ability to invoice our clients, and clients may refuse to pay invoices or may otherwise bring claims against us or stop using our solutions. While we generally seek to disclaim liability for the acts of our partners within our customer agreements, there can be no assurances that such provisions will be effective. Our ability to recover from our integration partners is often limited, and if our customers seek to recover from us, we may not be able to recover from our partners. We also cannot be sure that any existing general liability insurance coverage would apply in these circumstances, that any such coverage will continue to be available on acceptable terms or will be available in sufficient amounts to cover one or more large claims, or that the insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. As a result, any such delays or failures,

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even if caused by an integration partners, could lead to losses, claims and liability for us, and could lead to a loss of customers and damage to our reputation, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our international expansion may expose us to additional risks.

While our historical operations have been focused in the United States, we have expanded our operations internationally in recent years to increase our customer base, infrastructure, offices, and employee count, among other things. We expect international expansion to continue in the near term, particularly in regards to our engineering operations and personnel that have been increasing in India. Our current or future international expansion may expose us to additional risks, including:    

If we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand, our business, financial condition and operating results may be adversely affected.

We believe that developing and maintaining awareness of our brand in a cost-effective manner is critical to achieving widespread acceptance of our existing solutions and future solutions and is an important element in attracting maintaining existing and attracting new customers and partners. We believe that our success depends on advertisers and publishers valuing our trusted, authoritative, and independent position in the ecosystem, which instills trust and confidence in the media buying process for our customers. Furthermore, we believe that the importance of brand recognition will increase as competition in our market increases. Our brand may be damaged if we are unable to deliver reliable, accurate services due to any delay or failure in integration with our partners, which may cause missing data or delays in data analysis. Additionally, any disruption in our services, whether caused by technological failures or otherwise, may adversely affect our brand, even if such disruption or failure was caused by a third-party service provider. These integration failures or interruptions in our services, whether caused by us, our partners or third-party service providers, could cause our customers to become dissatisfied with our services and could cause damage to our reputation and our brand, which may have a material adverse effect on our business and operating results.

Additionally, successful promotion of our brand will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts and on our ability to deliver valuable solutions for our customers, including advertisers and publishers. In the past, our efforts to build our brand have involved significant expense. Brand promotion activities may not yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses that we incurred in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, or incur substantial expenses in an unsuccessful attempt to promote and maintain our brand, we may fail to attract enough new customers or partners or retain our existing customers or partners and our business could suffer.

Our future success will depend in part on our ability to expand into new channels.

We deliver our solutions through various digital media channels, including display, video, social, connected TV, mobile, and desktop. In the future, we may decide to broaden the spectrum of our channels further if we

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believe that doing so would significantly increase the value we can offer to customers. We believe a broader platform delivering our solutions through complementary channels can enhance our value proposition for existing and prospective customers. However, any future attempts to enter new channels, such as connected TV, may not be successful and could have a significant impact on our results of operations, revenues, and future offerings.

Our success in expanding into any additional channels will depend on various factors, including our ability to:

If we are unable to successfully adapt our solutions to additional channels and effectively market such offerings to our existing and prospective customers, or if we are unable to maintain our pricing and measurement models in these additional channels, we may not be able to achieve our growth or business objectives. Additionally, if the integrations and partnerships that we rely on to provide these current and future channels, such as proprietary platforms, are not readily replaced, we could suffer losses in revenues and changes in results of operations that could have a material impact.

Furthermore, if our channel mix changes due to a shift in client demand, such as customers shifting their spending more quickly or more extensively than expected to channels in which we have relatively less functionality, features, or inventory, demand for our platform could decrease, we may be required to develop new technology to effectively measure to remain competitive (e.g., social video) or may be unable to develop technology to measure and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.

We have a history of net losses and may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future, particularly if our revenue growth rate may decline.

We experienced net losses of $32.4 million and $51.3 million for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. As of December 31, 2020, our accumulated deficit was $126.8 million. We cannot assure you that we will achieve profitability in future periods, and we may continue to incur significant losses in future periods.

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We cannot assure you that we will generate sufficient revenue to offset the cost of maintaining our platform and maintaining and growing our business in the future. We cannot assure you that our revenue will continue to grow or will not decline. Our revenue growth rate may decline in the future because of a variety of factors, including increased competition and the maturation of our business and our ability to convert customers from a variable model to a flat fee model. You should not consider our historical revenue growth or operating expenses as indicative of our future performance. If our revenue growth rate declines or our operating expenses exceed our expectations, our financial performance will be adversely affected. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels in future periods in order to maintain or increase our level of profitability.

Additionally, we also expect our costs to increase in future periods, which could negatively affect our future results of operations. We expect to continue to expend substantial financial and other resources on acquiring and retaining customers, expanding and maintaining internet platform integrations, our technology infrastructure, research and development (including investments in our research and development team and the development of new features), expansion into new markets, marketing, and general administration (including expenses related to being a public company). These investments may not result in increased revenue or growth in our business. If we cannot successfully grow our revenue at a rate that exceeds the increases in costs associated with our business, we will not be able to maintain profitability or generate positive cash flow on a sustained basis.

We are subject to payment-related risks and, if our customers do not pay or dispute their invoices, our business, financial condition and operating results may be adversely affected.

We have a large and diverse customer base. Our customers may experience financial difficulty, file for bankruptcy protection or cease operations. Consequently, we may be involved in disputes with customers over the operation of our platform, the terms of our agreements or our billings for purchases made by them through our platform. If we are unable to collect or make adjustments to bills to customers, we could incur write-offs for bad debt, which could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations for the periods in which the write-offs occur. In the future, bad debt may exceed reserves for such contingencies and our bad debt exposure may increase over time. Any increase in write-offs for bad debt could have a materially negative effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results. In the event we are not paid by our customers on time or at all, our results of operations and financial condition would be adversely impacted. Further, growth and increased competitive pressure in the global digital advertising ecosystem is causing customers to demand lower costs, more services and more rapid innovation of products, resulting in overall increased focus by all industry participants on pricing, transparency, and cash and collection cycles. Some customers have experienced financial pressures that have motivated them to slow the timing of their payments to us. If customers slow their payments to us or our cash collections are significantly diminished as a result of these dynamics, our revenue and/or cash flow could be adversely affected and we may need to use working capital to fund our accounts payable pending collection from the customers. This may result in additional costs and cause us to forgo or defer other more productive uses of that working capital.

We have revenue share agreements with certain DSPs and any material changes to those sharing arrangements could affect our costs.

Our future growth will depend on our ability to enter into and retain successful strategic relationships with third parties, and in particular, DSPs. We have entered into long-term revenue share agreements with certain DSPs, including Google and The Trade Desk, which incentivize these partners to continue their relationship with us. Under these agreements, the DSPs receive consideration based on a percentage of the revenue that is received through the use of our products by buyers (e.g., advertisers and agencies) using these DSPs. Our contracts generally renew automatically, but there are some proprietary platform contracts that allow our partners to terminate their agreements with us (including contracts with DSPs with revenue share arrangements) without cause and with short notice periods. Such terminations would result in the loss of important partner relationships and would have an adverse impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, if any such key DSPs or other strategic third parties negotiate or otherwise improve economic or other terms that

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are more favorable to them (including, for example, if a few key DSPs or strategic partners negotiate for a higher revenue share, adversely modify the revenue share arrangements within our overarching agreements with such parties), then our costs could increase, our revenue could decrease and our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially adversely affected.

Our sales and marketing efforts may require significant investments and, in certain cases, involve long sales cycles, which can result in significant time between initial contact with a prospect and execution of a customer contract, making it difficult to project when, if at all, we will obtain new customers and when we will generate revenue from those customers.

Our sales cycle, from initial contact to contract execution and implementation, can take significant time, and may be impacted by a number of factors, such as customer size, number of markets and sales relationship. Our sales efforts involve educating our customers about the use, technical capabilities and benefits of our platform. Some of our customers undertake an evaluation process that frequently involves not only our platform but also the offerings of our competitors. We may spend substantial time and resources prospecting for new business or responding to requests for proposals, and it may not result in revenue. As a result, it is difficult to predict when we will obtain new customers and begin generating revenue from these new customers. Even if our sales efforts result in obtaining a new customer, for those customers contracting with us on a usage-based pricing model, the customer controls when and to what extent it uses our platform and they may delay activation and usage. As a result, we may not be able to add customers, or generate revenue, as quickly as we may expect, which could harm our growth prospects.

If we do not manage our growth effectively, the quality of our platform and solutions may suffer, and our business, results of operations, and financial condition may be adversely affected.

The continued growth in our business may place demands on our infrastructure and our operational, managerial, administrative, and financial resources. Our success will depend on the ability of our management to manage growth effectively. Among other things, this will require us at various times to:

If we do not manage our growth well, the efficacy and performance of our platform may suffer, which could harm our reputation and reduce demand for our platform and solutions. Failure to manage future growth effectively could harm our business and have an adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

Future acquisitions, strategic investments or alliances could disrupt our business and harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We explore, on an ongoing basis, potential acquisitions of companies or technologies, strategic investments, or alliances to strengthen our business, however, we have limited experience in acquiring and integrating businesses, products, and technologies. While we have completed multiple acquisitions, our only experience with a complex acquisition has been the purchase of ADmantX, which required significant management resources to integrate.

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Even if we identify an appropriate acquisition candidate, we may not be successful in negotiating the terms or financing of the acquisition, and our due diligence may fail to identify all of the problems, liabilities or other shortcomings or challenges of an acquired business, product or technology, including issues related to intellectual property, product quality or architecture, regulatory compliance practices, revenue recognition or other accounting practices, or employee or customer issues. Acquisitions involve numerous risks, any of which could harm our business, including:

Failure to appropriately mitigate these risks or other issues related to such acquisitions and strategic investments could result in reducing or completely eliminating any anticipated benefits of transactions, and harm our business generally. Future acquisitions could also result in dilutive issuances of our equity securities, the incurrence of debt, contingent liabilities, amortization expenses or the impairment of goodwill, any of which could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

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Our ability to achieve our anticipated growth plans will depend on our ability to expand our center of excellence in India in a cost efficient manner.

Our ability to grow our business and meet our growth plans will depend on our ability to continue to expand our software engineering team. While we are in the process of expanding our center of excellence in India in order to meet these growth plans in a cost efficient manner, there is no assurance that we will be able to achieve our expansion plans or that our reliance upon resources in India will enable us to achieve meaningful cost reductions or greater resource efficiency. Further, our development efforts and other operations in India involve significant risks, including difficulty hiring and retaining appropriate software engineering and management resources due to intense competition for such resources and resulting wage inflation and differing labor laws, knowledge transfer related to our technology and resulting exposure to misappropriation of intellectual property or information that is proprietary to us, our customers, and other third parties, heightened exposure to changes in economic, security, and political conditions in India, and fluctuations in currency exchange rates and tax compliance in India. Difficulties resulting from the factors noted above and other risks related to our operations in India and other jurisdictions could increase our expenses, impact our growth plans, harm our competitive position and damage our reputation.

Our international operations require increased expenditures and impose additional risks and compliance imperatives, and failure to successfully execute our international plans will adversely affect our growth and operating results.

We have numerous operations outside of North America, including in the U.K, the European Union (the “E.U.”), Japan, India, Singapore, and Australia. Our initial international offices were formed in 2013 and nearly all of our subsequent offices have been formed within the past five years. Up until 2020, our international offices have been predominantly sales, customer support, marketing and general and administrative groups.

For sales development, our business strategy includes expanding our customer base internationally, in particular in LatAm and the APAC region. Our ability to manage and expand our business and conduct our operations internationally requires considerable attention and resources. Attracting new customers outside the U.S. may require more time and expense than in the U.S., in part due to language barriers and the need to educate such customers about our platform, and we may not be successful in establishing and maintaining these relationships. Additionally, in emerging markets, the cost of our verification services make up a large percentage of the buyer’s media budget, as costs of media in emerging countries are low when compared to developed countries. Within these countries, we often adjust or make concessions to our pricing in order to enter and sell in such markets. As a result, there can be no assurance that we will be successful in expanding our customer base internationally in a cost-effective manner or at all.

The data center and network infrastructure in some overseas markets may not be as reliable as in North America and Europe, which could disrupt our platform and operations. In addition, our international operations will require us to develop and administer our internal controls and legal and compliance practices in countries with different cultural norms, languages, currencies, legal requirements, and business practices than the U.S., which may burden management, increase travel, infrastructure and legal compliance costs, and add complexity to our enforcement of advertising standards across languages and countries. International operations also impose risks and challenges in addition to those faced in the U.S. including:

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One or more of these requirements and risks may make our international operations more difficult and expensive or less successful than we expect, and may preclude us from operating in some markets. There is no assurance that our international expansion efforts will be successful, and we may not generate sufficient revenue or margins from our international business to cover our expenses or contribute to our growth.

Certain of our operating results and financial metrics may be difficult to accurately predict as a result of seasonality.

We have experienced, and expect to continue to experience in the future, seasonality in our business, and our operating results and financial condition may be affected by such trends in the future. We generally experience seasonal fluctuations in demand for our solutions and services, and believe that our quarterly sales are affected by industry buying patterns. For example, many marketers tend to devote a significant portion of their budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with consumer holiday spending and to reduce spend in the first quarter of the calendar year. We believe that the seasonal trends that we have experienced in the past may continue for the foreseeable future, particularly as we expand our sales to larger organizations. To the extent we experience this seasonality, it may cause fluctuations in our operating results and financial metrics, and make forecasting our future operating results and financial metrics difficult. Additionally, we do not have sufficient experience in selling certain of our solutions and products to determine if demand for these services are or will be subject to material seasonality.

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Our revenue model depends on high impression volumes, the growth of which may not be sustained.

We generate revenue by charging a cost per thousand impressions (“CPM”) based on the volume of purchased digital ads that we measure on behalf of these customers. If the volume of impressions we measure does not continue to grow or decreases for any reason, our business will suffer. For example, if digital ad spending remains constant and our advertiser customers transition to higher CPM ad inventory, overall impression volumes may decrease, which may result in fewer impressions for us to verify and a corresponding decline in our revenues. We cannot assure you that growth in volume of impressions will be sustained. If our customers adjust their buying patterns or alter their preference to higher CPM ad inventory, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be harmed.

We have a short operating history, which makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and may increase the risk that we will not be successful.

We have a relatively short operating history, which limits our ability to forecast our future operating results and subjects us to a number of uncertainties, including with respect to our ability to plan for and model future growth. We may not be able to sustain our current rate of growth or maintain our current revenue levels. We have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies in developing industries. If our assumptions regarding these uncertainties, which we use to manage our business, are incorrect or change in response to changes in our markets, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our operating and financial results could differ materially from our expectations, our business could suffer and our stock price could decline. Any success that we may experience in the future will depend in large part on our ability to, among other things:

The market for buying digital advertising verification solutions is relatively new and evolving. If this market and the corresponding markets develop slower or differently than we expect, our business, growth prospects and financial condition would be adversely affected.

In 2020, we generated over 90% of our revenue from advertiser customers that purchase our services to measure the quality and performance of ads purchased directly from publishers and proprietary platforms, and

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through programmatic platforms to evaluate the quality of ad inventories before they are purchased. We expect that spending on these solutions will continue to be a substantial source of revenue for the foreseeable future. Our growth will depend on us capitalizing on the market opportunity to provide measurement of ad effectiveness and efficiency to brands and help customers understand marketing performance. If the market for ad measurement and effectiveness solutions deteriorates or develops more slowly than we expect, it could reduce demand for our solutions, and our business, growth prospects, and financial condition would be adversely affected.

In addition, our revenue may not necessarily grow at the same rate as spend on our solutions. Growth in spend may outpace growth in our revenue as the market for digital advertising verification matures due to a number of factors including pricing competition and shifts in product, media, client, and channel mix. A significant change in revenue as a percentage of spend could reflect an adverse change in our business and growth prospects. In addition, any such fluctuations, even if they reflect our strategic decisions, could cause our performance to fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, and adversely affect the price of our common stock.

Our estimates of market opportunity and forecasts of market growth included in this prospectus may prove to be inaccurate.

Market opportunity estimates and growth forecasts are subject to significant uncertainty and are based on assumptions and estimates that may not prove to be accurate. Our estimates and forecasts relating to the size and expected growth of our market may prove to be inaccurate. For example, the global digital advertising ecosystem may not grow at the rate that we currently expect, the migration of advertising from linear television to connected TV may not occur on the scale we currently anticipate, or the growth of subscription media platforms as opposed to platforms supported by advertising may all impact the estimates and growth forecasts we have included in this prospectus. Even if the market in which we compete meets our size estimates and forecasted growth, our business could fail to grow at similar rates, if at all and we may not be able to bring in sufficient amounts of new customers to keep pace with market growth. Other factors, such as social disruptions, social unrest, or social trends, may cause advertisers to pause, reduce, cancel, or otherwise alter their spending or engage with our solutions less and cause publishers to choose not to monetize specific inventory.

We may experience fluctuations in our results of operations, which could make our future results of operations difficult to predict or cause our results of operations to fall below analysts’ and investors’ expectations.

Our quarterly and annual results of operations have fluctuated in the past and we expect our future results of operations to fluctuate due to a variety of factors, many of which are beyond our control. Fluctuations in our results of operations could cause our performance to fall below the expectations of analysts and investors, and adversely affect the price of our common stock. Because our business is changing and evolving rapidly, our historical results of operations may not be necessarily indicative of our future results of operations. Factors that may cause our results of operations to fluctuate include the following:

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Based upon the factors above and others beyond our control, we have a limited ability to forecast our future revenue, costs and expenses. If we fail to meet or exceed operating results expectations of analysts and investors or if analysts and investors have estimates and forecasts of our future performance that are unrealistic or that we do not meet, the market price of our common stock could decline. In addition, if one or more of the analysts who cover us adversely change their recommendation regarding our stock, the market price of our common stock could decline.

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Our corporate culture has contributed to our success and, if we are unable to maintain it as we grow, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be harmed.

We are undergoing rapid growth and have experienced and may continue to experience rapid expansion of our employee ranks. As of December 31, 2020, we had 632 employees. We believe our corporate culture has been a key element of our success. However, as our organization grows, it may be difficult to maintain our culture, which could reduce our ability to innovate and operate effectively. The failure to maintain the key aspects of our culture as our organization grows could result in decreased employee satisfaction, increased difficulty in attracting top talent, increased turnover and could compromise our ability to maintain our infrastructure and platform, the quality of our customer service, all of which are important to our success and to the effective execution of our business strategy. In the event we are unable to maintain our corporate culture as we grow to scale, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be harmed.

Our business is subject to the risks of earthquakes, fires, floods and other natural catastrophic events and to interruption by man-made problems such as terrorism, computer viruses or social disruption impacting advertising spending.

Our systems and operations are vulnerable to damage or interruption from earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, other acts of nature, power losses, telecommunications failures, terrorist or criminal acts or attacks, social issues, protests, discontent, and disruption that affect advertising spending or the ability for publishers to monetize inventory, vandalism, sabotage, acts of war, human errors, break-ins, cyber-attacks or failures, pandemics or other public health crises, or similar events. For example, a significant natural disaster, such as an earthquake, fire, or flood, could have a material adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition, and our insurance coverage may be insufficient to compensate us for losses that may occur. Additionally, our business and revenues could be affected by social issues, protests or disruptions. For example, if there is public disapproval or boycotting of a specific platform, such as Facebook or other proprietary platforms, our ability to measure and optimize ad placements or to forecast usage may be impacted based on unforeseen trends or events. In addition, acts of terrorism could cause disruptions in our business or the economy as a whole. Our principal executive offices, and largest office, is located in Manhattan, a city which has experienced acts of terrorism, protests, and natural disasters in the past. Our cloud partners, including AWS, may also be vulnerable to computer viruses, break-ins, cyber-attacks, such as coordinated denial-of-service attacks or ransomware, or other failures, and similar disruptions from unauthorized tampering with our computer systems, which could lead to interruptions, delays, loss of critical data or the unauthorized disclosure of confidential customer data. Although we have implemented security measures and disaster recovery capabilities, there can be no assurance that we will not suffer from business interruption, or unavailability or loss of data, as a result of any such events. As we rely heavily on our servers, computer, and communications systems and the internet to conduct our business and provide high quality service to our customers, such disruptions could negatively impact our ability to run our business, result in loss of existing or potential customers and increased expenses, and/or have an adverse effect on our reputation and the reputation of our products and services, any of which would adversely affect our operating results and financial condition.

Risks Related to Intellectual Property and Technology

Failures in the systems and infrastructure supporting our solutions and operations could significantly disrupt our operations and cause us to lose customers.

In addition to the optimal and efficient performance of our platform, our business relies on the continued and uninterrupted performance of our software, hardware, and cloud infrastructures, and our platform and its underlying infrastructure are inherently complex and may contain material defects or error. We currently process on average over 100 billion daily web transactions through our highly scalable, cloud-based technology platform.

Sustained or repeated system failures of our software or hardware infrastructures (such as massive and sustained data center outages) or of the software or hardware infrastructures of our third-party providers, which

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inhibit our ability to provide our solutions in a timely manner or cause performance issues with our platform, could significantly reduce the attractiveness of our offering to our customers, reduce our revenue or otherwise negatively impact our financial situation, impair our reputation, undermine trust in our brand, and subject us to significant liability. Specifically, there is significant risk that our proprietary platform partners may cause data delays or there may be data missing, which impacts our ability to deliver our products and services.

In addition, while we seek to maintain excess capacity to facilitate the rapid provision of new customer deployments and the expansion of existing customer deployments, we may need to increase data center hosting capacity, bandwidth, storage, power, or other elements of our system architecture and our infrastructure as our customer base and/or our traffic continues to grow.

Our existing systems may not be able to scale up in a manner satisfactory to our existing or prospective customers, and may not be adequately designed with the necessary reliability and redundancy of certain critical portions of our infrastructure to avoid performance delays or outages that could be harmful to our business. We must continue to increase the capacity of our platform to support our high-volume strategy, to cope with increased data volumes and an increasing variety of digital marketing formats and platforms, and to maintain a stable service infrastructure and reliable service delivery. Delivering this increased capacity while concurrently reducing organizational and operational costs or maintaining our current lower cost structure will require us to implement more efficient data processing and to implement more efficient cloud-based services as they become available and drive optimization processes related to the existing environment.

Our failure to continuously upgrade or increase the reliability and redundancy of our infrastructure to meet the demands of a growing base of global customers and partners could adversely affect the functioning and performance of our technology and could in turn affect our results of operations.

Finally, our systems are vulnerable to damage from a variety of sources, some of which are outside of our control, including network and telecommunications failures, natural disasters, terrorism, power outages, a variety of other possible outages affecting data centers, and malicious human acts, including hacking, computer viruses, malware, and other security breaches. Techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or to sabotage systems change frequently and generally are not recognized until launched against a target. As a result, we may be unable to anticipate some of these techniques or to implement adequate preventive measures.

Any steps we take to increase the security, reliability and redundancy of our systems may be expensive and may not be successful in preventing system failures. We have experienced, and may in the future experience, disruptions, outages, and other performance problems due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, introductions of new functionality, human or software errors, capacity constraints due to an overwhelming number of users simultaneously accessing our solutions, distributed denial of service attacks, or other security related incidents.

If we are unable to prevent system failures, the functioning and performance of our solutions could suffer, which in turn could interrupt our business and harm our results of operations.

Operational, technical and performance issues with our platform, whether real or perceived may adversely affect our business, reputation, financial condition and operating results.

We depend upon the sustained and uninterrupted performance of our platform to provide digital marketing solutions for ad viewability, ad fraud prevention and brand safety. If our platform cannot scale to meet demand, if there are errors in our execution of any of these functions on our platform, or if we experience outages, then there may be consumer dissatisfaction, damage claims, damage to reputation, and our business may be harmed. For example, if we fail to measure campaigns that were previously paid for by advertisers or our technology interferes with the delivery of ads on websites or other proprietary platforms, we could be subject to lawsuits or requests by our customers that we make them whole, which could include costs of media (i.e., the amount such

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advertiser paid to websites) that outweigh the verification fees or revenues originally gathered from the customer and could result in litigation or damage to our reputation. We may also face material delays in introducing new services, products and enhancements.

Our platform is complex and multifaceted, and operational and performance issues could arise both from the platform itself and from outside factors. Errors, failures, vulnerabilities, or bugs have been found in the past, and may in the future, be found. We also rely on third-party integrations with proprietary platforms, DSPs, ad servers, publishers/websites for our products, and services to perform properly. Additionally, our platform is often used in connection with our customers’ respective technology platforms utilizing different operating systems, system management software, equipment and networking configurations, which may cause errors in, or failures of, our platform or such other computing environments. Operational and performance issues with our platform could include the failure of our user interface, outages, data delays, errors during upgrades or patches, errors due to manual data entry or processes, discrepancies in costs billed versus costs paid, unanticipated volume overwhelming our databases, server failure, or catastrophic events affecting one or more cloud environments. While we have built redundancies in our systems, full redundancies do not exist. Some failures will shut our platform down completely, others only partially, but a disrupting event could result in prolonged downtime of our operations. Partial failures, which we have experienced in the past, could result in the misapplication of exclusion and inclusion lists to campaigns or a manual error in keyword lists, resulting in misdelivery of ads, which includes ads being viewed in a context the customer did not want them to be displayed or blocking the ads from being placed where the client intends, in each case resulting in unanticipated financial obligations or impact.

Our platform also operates on our data processing equipment that is housed in third-party commercial data centers that we do not control or on servers owned and operated by cloud-based service providers, which may leave us vulnerable to technical issues or outages that we cannot easily control or remedy. Although we generally enter into service level agreements with these parties, we exercise no control over their operations, which makes us vulnerable to any errors, interruptions or delays that they may experience. All of these facilities and systems are vulnerable to interruption and/or damage from a number of sources, many of which are beyond our control, including, without limitation: (i) loss of adequate power or cooling and telecommunications failures; (ii) fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, and other natural disasters; (iii) software and hardware errors, failures, or crashes; (iv) financial insolvency; and (v) computer viruses, malware, hacking, terrorism, and similar disruptive problems. In particular, intentional cyber-attacks present a serious issue because they are difficult to prevent and remediate and can be used to defraud our customers and to steal confidential or proprietary data from us or our customers. These vulnerabilities may increase with the complexity and scope of our systems and their interactions with customers.

Operational and performance issues with our platform could also result in negative publicity, damage to our brand and reputation, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our platform, increased costs or loss of revenue, loss of the ability to access our platform, loss of competitive position, or claims by customers for losses sustained by them. Alleviating problems resulting from such issues could require significant expenditures of capital and other resources and could cause interruptions, delays or the cessation of our business, any of which may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results.

If unauthorized access is obtained to user, customer or inventory and third-party provider data, or our platform is compromised, our services may be disrupted or perceived as insecure, and as a result, we may lose existing customers or fail to attract new customers, and we may incur significant reputational harm and legal and financial liabilities.

Our products and services involve the collection, transmission, and storage of significant amounts of data from buy-side and sell-side customers, third-party publishers (e.g., websites and mobile applications), DSP partners, proprietary platforms and third-party data providers, a large volume of which is hosted by third-party service providers. Our services and data could be exposed to unauthorized access due to activities that breach or

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undermine security measures, including: negligence or malfeasance by internal or external actors; attempts by outside parties to fraudulently induce employees, customers, or vendors to disclose sensitive information in order to gain access to our data; or errors or vulnerabilities in our systems, products or processes or in those of our service providers, customers, and vendors. For example, from time-to-time, we experience cyberattacks of varying degrees and other attempts to obtain unauthorized access to our systems, including to employee mailboxes. We have dedicated and expect to continue to dedicate resources toward security protections that shield data from these activities. However, such measures cannot provide absolute security. Further, we can expect that the deployment of techniques to circumvent our security measures may occur with more frequency and sophistication and may not be recognized until launched against a target. Accordingly, we may be unable to anticipate or detect these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures and we cannot be certain that we will be able to prevent vulnerabilities in our solutions or address vulnerabilities that we may become aware of in the future.

Finally, while we have developed worldwide incident response teams and dedicated resources to incident response processes, such processes could, among other issues, fail to be adequate or accurately assess the incident severity, not proceed quickly enough, or fail to sufficiently remediate an incident. A breach of our security and/or our failure to respond sufficiently to a security incident could disrupt our services and result in theft, misuse, loss, corruption, or improper use or disclosure of data. This could result in government investigations, enforcement actions, trigger audits by customers and other legal and financial liability, and/or loss of confidence in the availability and security of our products and services, all of which could seriously harm our reputation and brand and impair our ability to attract and retain customers. While our contracts and technical specifications with customers, data providers, vendors, DSPs, and proprietary platforms from importing or otherwise providing IAS with information that would allow us to directly identify individuals, if one or more of these parties provided such information in violation of our policies and our systems are breached, we could be subject to contractual breach and indemnification claims from other parties. In addition, our products and services rely on the collection, transmission, and storage of data that may be considered personal information under certain applicable laws related to data privacy (e.g., IP addresses), which could result in similar breach and indemnity claims, as well as liabilities under such laws, if our systems are breached. There can be no assurance that any limitations of liability provisions in our contracts for a security breach would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from any such liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim. We also cannot be sure that our existing general liability insurance coverage and coverage for errors or omissions will continue to be available on acceptable terms or will be available in sufficient amounts to cover one or more large claims, or that the insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results.

Cyberattacks could also compromise our own trade secrets and other sensitive information and result in such information being disclosed to others and becoming less valuable, which could negatively affect our business, reputation, and our competitive advantage.

Our inability to use software licensed from third parties, or our use of open source software under license terms that interfere with our proprietary rights, could disrupt our business.

Our technology platform and internal systems incorporate software licensed from third parties, including some software, known as open source software, which we use without charge. Although we monitor our use of open source software, the terms of many open source licenses to which we are subject have not been interpreted by U.S. or foreign courts, and there is a risk that such licenses could be construed in a manner that imposes unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to provide our technology offering to our customers. Moreover, we cannot ensure that we have not incorporated additional open source software in our products in a manner that is inconsistent with the terms of the applicable license or our current policies and procedures. In the future, we could be required to seek licenses from third parties in order to continue offering our solutions, which

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licenses may not be available on terms that are acceptable to us, or at all. Claims related to our use of open source software could also result in litigation, require us to purchase costly licenses or require us to devote additional research and development resources to change the software underlying our solutions, any of which would have a negative effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results and may not be possible in a timely manner. We and our customers may also be subject to suits by parties claiming infringement due to the reliance by our solutions on certain open source software, and such litigation could be costly for us to defend or subject us to injunctions enjoining us from the sale of our solutions that contain open source software.

Alternatively, we may need to re-engineer our offering or discontinue using portions of the functionality provided by our technology. In addition, the terms of open source software licenses may require us to provide software that we develop using such software to others on unfavorable terms, such as by precluding us from charging license fees, requiring us to disclose our source code, or requiring us to license certain of our own proprietary source code under the terms of the applicable open source license. Any such restriction on the use of our own software, or our inability to use open source or third-party software, could result in disruptions to our business or operations, or delays in our development of future offerings or enhancements of our existing platform, which could impair our business.

If the non-proprietary technology, software, products and services that we use are unavailable, become subject to future license or other terms we cannot agree to, or do not perform as we expect, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be harmed.

We depend on various technology, software, products, and services from third parties or available as open source, including cloud partners, including AWS, and integration frameworks (e.g., APIs technology, some of which are critical to the features and functionality of our platform and solutions. For example, in 2019 we licensed a text analysis platform pursuant to a 30-year license agreement under which the licensor must also provide at least 10 years of support services. This text analysis platform is critical to our business operations and the loss or limitation of the license or support services under this license agreement could adversely impact our business operations. In order for customers to effectively leverage the reach and opportunity presented by consumers’ shift to digital means in ways they desire and otherwise optimize and verify campaigns, our platform must have access to data to provide us with a comprehensive view of digital ad transactions across numerous types of inventory in order to measure data and allow for the verification of the ads. Identifying, negotiating, complying with, and integrating with third-party terms and technology are complex, costly, and time-consuming matters.

In addition, in the future we may identify additional third-party intellectual property we may need to license in order to engage in our business, including to develop or commercialize new products or services. However, such licenses may not be available on acceptable terms or at all. The licensing or acquisition of third-party intellectual property rights is a competitive area, and other companies may pursue strategies to license or acquire third-party intellectual property rights that we may consider attractive or necessary. Other companies may have a competitive advantage over us due to their size, capital resources and greater development or commercialization capabilities. In addition, companies that perceive us to be a competitor may be unwilling to assign or license rights to us on reasonable pricing terms or at all. If we are unable to enter into the necessary licenses on acceptable terms or at all, it could adversely impact our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Failure by third-party providers to maintain, support, or secure their technology either generally or for our account specifically, or downtime, errors, or defects in their products or services, could adversely impact our platform, our administrative obligations, or other areas of our business. Having to replace any third-party providers or their technology, products or services could result in outages or difficulties in our ability to provide our services and we may not be able to have replacements for the third-party services or products on economically beneficial terms or within a reasonable timeframe. We also may not be able to create replacement features in-house within a timely and cost-efficient manner. If we are unsuccessful in establishing or maintaining our relationships with our third-party providers or otherwise need to replace them, internal resources may need to

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be diverted and our business, financial condition and results of operations could be harmed. If we fail to integrate our platform with new third-party applications and platforms that our customers use for marketing, campaign management, sales, or services purposes, or fail to renew existing relationships pursuant to which we currently provide such integration, we may not be able to offer the functionality that our customers need, which would negatively impact our ability to generate new revenue or maintain existing revenue and adversely impact our business.

We may be sued by third parties for alleged infringement, misappropriation or other violation of their proprietary rights, which would result in additional expense and potential damages.

There is significant patent and other intellectual property development activity in the digital marketing industry. Third-party intellectual property rights may cover significant aspects of our technologies or business methods or block us from expanding our offerings. Our success depends on the continual development of our platform. From time to time, we may receive claims from third parties that our platform and underlying technology infringe, misappropriate, or violate such third parties’ intellectual property rights. To the extent we gain greater public recognition, these types of suits may occur more frequently, and we may face a higher risk of being the subject of intellectual property claims. The cost of defending against such claims, whether or not the claims have merit, is significant, regardless of whether we are successful in our defense. Defending against such claims could divert the attention of management, technical personnel and other employees from our business operations. Litigation regarding intellectual property rights is inherently uncertain due to the complex issues involved, and we may not be successful in defending ourselves in such matters. In addition, during the course of litigation there could be public announcements of the results of hearings, motions, or other interim proceedings or developments. If securities analysts or investors perceive these results to be negative, it could have a substantial adverse effect on the price of our common stock. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation or diversion of our management’s attention and resources, could delay further sales or the implementation of our products and platform capabilities, impair the functionality of our products and platform capabilities, delay introductions of new solutions, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our solutions, or injure our reputation. Any of the foregoing could adversely impact our business, financial, condition and results of operations.

If we fail to comply with any of the obligations under our license agreements, we may be required to pay damages and the applicable licensor may have the right to terminate the license. Termination by the licensor would cause us to lose valuable rights, and could prevent us from enabling certain features and functionality into our products and services, selling our products and services, or inhibit our ability to commercialize future solutions. In addition, our rights to certain technologies, are licensed to us on a non-exclusive basis. The owners of these non-exclusively licensed technologies are therefore free to license them to third parties, including our competitors, on terms that may be superior to those offered to us, which could place us at a competitive disadvantage. In addition, the agreements under which we license intellectual property or technology from third parties are generally complex, and certain provisions in such agreements may be susceptible to multiple interpretations. The resolution of any contract interpretation disagreement that may arise could narrow what we believe to be the scope of our rights to the relevant intellectual property or technology, or increase what we believe to be our financial or other obligations under the relevant agreement. Any of the foregoing could adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Additionally, we have obligations to indemnify certain of our customers or inventory and data suppliers in connection with certain intellectual property claims. If we are found to infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate these rights, we could potentially be required to cease utilizing portions of our platform and we may be prohibited from developing, commercializing, or continuing to provide some or all of our offering unless we obtain licenses from, and pay royalties to, the holders of the intellectual property. We may also be required to develop alternative non-infringing technology, which could require significant time and expense. Additionally, we could be required to pay royalty payments, either as a one-time fee or ongoing, as well as damages for past use that was deemed to be infringing. If we cannot license or develop technology for any allegedly infringing

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aspect of our business, we would be forced to limit or terminate our service and may be unable to compete effectively. Finally, we may suffer harm to our reputation, and customers, potential customers and others may avoid working with us. Any of these results could harm our business.

We may be unable to obtain, maintain, protect or enforce intellectual property and proprietary rights that are important to our business, which could enable others to copy or use aspects of our technology without compensating us, thereby eroding our competitive advantages and harming our business.

We rely upon a combination of trade secrets, confidentiality agreements, non-disclosure agreements, assignment of invention agreements, and additional contractual restrictions on disclosure and use as well as trademark, copyright, patent and other intellectual property laws to establish and protect our proprietary rights. These laws, agreements, procedures, and restrictions provide only limited protection. We currently have Channel Science, IAS, IAS (logo), Integral, Integral Ad Science, Quality Impressions, Total Visibility, and TRAQ, among others, and variants and other marks registered as trademarks or pending registration in the U.S. and certain foreign countries. We also rely on copyright laws to protect computer programs related to our platform and our proprietary technologies, although to date we have not registered our copyrights. We have registered numerous internet domain names in the U.S. and certain foreign countries related to our business.

We endeavor to enter into agreements with our employees and contractors in order to limit access to and disclosure of our proprietary information, as well as to assign all intellectual property rights developed for us. However, we may not execute agreements with every party who has access to our confidential information or contributes to the development of our intellectual property and a counterparty to such agreements may not comply herewith. Accordingly, we may become subject to disputes with such individuals regarding the ownership of intellectual property that we consider to be ours. Protecting our intellectual property is a challenge, especially after our employees or our contractors end their relationships with us, and, in some cases, decide to work for our competitors. Our contracts with our employees and contractors that relate to intellectual property issues generally restrict the use of our confidential information solely in connection with our products and services, and strictly prohibit reverse engineering. However, reverse engineering our software and data or the theft or misuse of our proprietary information could still occur by employees or other third parties who have access to our technology. Enforceability of the non-compete agreements that we have in place is not guaranteed, and contractual restrictions could be breached without our knowledge or adequate remedies.

Historically, we have prioritized keeping our technology architecture, trade secrets, and engineering roadmap private and, have not patented the majority of our proprietary technology. As a result, we cannot look to patent enforcement rights to protect much of our proprietary technology. However, we have obtained over 20 patents on our proprietary technology and also have over 20 pending patent applications, all in the United States. We may not be able to obtain any further patents, and our pending applications may not result in the issuance of patents. Any issued patents may be challenged, invalidated or circumvented, and any rights granted under these patents may not actually provide adequate defensive protection or competitive advantages to us. Additionally, the process of obtaining and maintaining patent protection is expensive and time-consuming, and we may not be able to prosecute all necessary or desirable patent applications at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner. However, effective protection of our intellectual property rights may require additional filings and applications in the future. Pending and future applications may not be approved, and any of our existing or future patents, trademarks or other intellectual property rights may not provide sufficient protection for our business as currently conducted or may be challenged by others or invalidated through administrative process or litigation. Additionally, patent rights in the U.S. have switched from the former “first-to-invent” system to a “first-to-file” system, which may favor larger competitors that have the resources to file more patent applications. Furthermore, our existing patents and any patents issued in the future may give rise to ownership claims or to claims for the payment of additional remuneration of fair price by persons having participated in the creation of the inventions. If we are unable to obtain, maintain, protect, and enforce our intellectual property and proprietary rights, it could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results, and financial condition.

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We may become involved in lawsuits to protect or enforce our intellectual property, which could be expensive, time consuming and unsuccessful.

Third parties, including our competitors, may infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate our intellectual property rights. Policing unauthorized use of our technology is difficult and we may not detect all such use. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those of the U.S., and mechanisms for enforcement of our proprietary rights in such countries may be inadequate. If we are unable to protect our proprietary rights (including in particular, the proprietary aspects of our platform) we may find ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to others who have not incurred the same level of expense, time, and effort to create and protect their intellectual property.

In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights and to protect our trade secrets. Litigation we bring to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could be costly, time-consuming, and distracting to management, and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Further, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims, and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights, and if such defenses, counterclaims, or countersuits are successful, we could lose valuable intellectual property rights. An adverse determination of any litigation proceedings could put our intellectual property at risk of being invalidated, cancelled, or interpreted narrowly. Furthermore, because of the substantial amount of discovery required in connection with intellectual property litigation, there is a risk that some of our confidential or sensitive information could be compromised by disclosure in the event of litigation.

We may become subject to claims that our employees, consultants, or advisors have wrongfully used or disclosed alleged trade secrets of their current or former employers.

Many of our employees and consultants are currently or were previously employed at other companies in our field, including our competitors or potential competitors. Although we try to ensure that our employees and consultants do not use the proprietary information or know-how of others in their work for us, we may be subject to claims that we or these individuals have used or disclosed intellectual property, including trade secrets or other proprietary information, of any such individual’s current or former employer. Litigation may be necessary to defend against these claims. If we fail in defending any such claims, in addition to paying monetary damages, we may lose valuable intellectual property rights or personnel. Even if we are successful in defending against such claims, litigation could result in substantial costs and be a distraction to management.

If our trademarks and trade names are not adequately protected, we may not be able to build name recognition in our markets of interest and our competitive position may be harmed.

The registered or unregistered trademarks or trade names that we own may be challenged, infringed, circumvented, declared generic, lapsed, or determined to be infringing on or dilutive of other marks. We may not be able to protect our rights in these trademarks and trade names, which we need in order to build name recognition with potential customers. In addition, third parties may file for registration of trademarks similar or identical to our trademarks, thereby impeding our ability to build brand identity and possibly leading to market confusion. If they succeed in registering or developing common law rights in such trademarks, and if we are not successful in challenging such third-party rights, we may not be able to use these trademarks to develop brand recognition of our solutions. In addition, there could be potential trade name or trademark infringement claims brought by owners of other registered trademarks or trademarks that incorporate variations of our registered or unregistered trademarks or trade names. If we are unable to establish name recognition based on our trademarks and trade names, we may not be able to compete effectively, which could adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

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Risks Related to Laws and Regulation

Privacy and data protection laws and regulation on digital advertising may cause us to incur additional or unexpected costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures, or cause us to change our platform or business model, which may have a material adverse effect on our business.

Information relating to individuals and their devices (sometimes called “personal information” or “personal data”) is regulated under a wide variety of local, state, national, and international laws and regulations that apply to the collection, use, retention, protection, disclosure, transfer (including transfer across national boundaries), and other processing of such data. We typically collect and store IP addresses, but may inadvertently be passed and may in the future start to intentionally collect other device identifiers (such as unique cookie identifiers and mobile application identifiers), which are or may be considered personal data or personal information in some jurisdictions or otherwise may be the subject of regulation.

Recently, the State of California adopted a law broadly regulating businesses’ processing of personal information, the CCPA, which went into effect January 1, 2020. The CCPA’s definition of “personal information” is broad enough to include online identifiers provided by individuals’ devices, applications, and protocols (such as IP addresses, mobile application identifiers, and unique cookie identifiers) and individuals’ location data, if there is potential that individuals can be identified by such data. The CCPA establishes a new privacy framework for covered businesses by, among other requirements, establishing new data privacy rights for consumers in the State of California (including rights to deletion of and access to personal information), imposing special rules on the collection of consumer data from minors, creating new notice obligations and new limits on the “sale” of personal information (interpreted by some to include common advertising practices), and creating a new and potentially severe statutory damages framework for violations of the CCPA and for businesses that fail to implement reasonable security procedures and practices to prevent data breaches. The CCPA also offers the possibility to a consumer to recover statutory damages for certain violations and could open the door more broadly to additional risks of individual and class-action lawsuits even though the statute’s private right of action is limited in scope.

The California Attorney General has proposed regulations implementing the CCPA that could impose further limitations. Although we have attempted to mitigate certain risks posed by the CCPA through contractual and platform changes, we cannot predict the timing or outcome of the California Attorney General’s rulemaking or the effect of the CCPA and its implementing regulations on our business. Responding to requirements under the CCPA and the proposed regulations will continue to affect our operations (and those of our industry partners). Moreover, the California Privacy Rights Act (“CPRA”), was approved by California voters in the election on November 3, 2020. The CPRA, which becomes effective on January 1, 2023, will significantly modify and expand the CCPA, potentially resulting in further uncertainty and requiring us to incur additional costs and expenses in an effort to comply.

Laws governing the processing of personal data in Europe (including the E.U. and European Economic Area (“EEA”), and the countries of Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) also continue to impact us. The GDPR, which applies to us, came into effect on May 25, 2018. Like the CCPA, the GDPR defines “personal data” broadly, and it enhances data protection obligations for controllers of such data and for service providers processing the data. It also provides certain rights, such as access and deletion, to the individuals about whom the personal data relates. The digital advertising industry has collaborated to create a user-facing framework for establishing and managing legal bases under the GDPR and other E.U. privacy laws including ePrivacy (discussed below). Although the framework is actively in use, we cannot predict its effectiveness over the long term. European regulators have questioned its viability and activists have filed complaints with regulators of alleged non-compliance by specific companies that employ the framework. Non-compliance with the GDPR can trigger steep fines of up to the greater of €20 million or 4% of total worldwide annual revenue. Continuing to maintain compliance with the GDPR’s requirements requires significant time, resources, and expense, as will the effort to monitor whether additional changes to our business practices and our backend configuration are needed, all of which may increase operating costs, or limit our ability to operate or expand our business. These existing and

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proposed laws, regulations, and industry standards can be costly to comply with and can delay or impede the development of new solutions, result in negative publicity and reputational harm, increase our operating costs, require significant management time and attention, increase our risk of non-compliance, and subject us to claims or other remedies, including fines or demands that we modify or cease existing business practices.

Regulatory investigations and enforcement actions could also impact us. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (the “ FTC”), uses its enforcement powers under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (which prohibits “unfair” and “deceptive” trade practices) to investigate companies engaging in online tracking. Advocacy organizations have also filed complaints with data protection authorities against advertising technology companies, arguing that certain of these companies’ practices do not comply with the GDPR. We cannot avoid the possibility that one of these investigations or enforcement actions will involve our practices. Further, our legal risk depends in part on our customers’ or other third parties’ adherence to privacy laws and regulations and their use of our services in ways consistent with end consumer expectations. We rely on representations made to us by customers that they will comply with all applicable laws, including all relevant privacy and data protection regulations. Although we make reasonable efforts to enforce such representations and contractual requirements, we do not fully audit our customers’ compliance with our recommended disclosures or their adherence to privacy laws and regulations. If our customers fail to adhere to our expectations or contracts in this regard, we and our customers could be subject to adverse publicity, damages, and related possible investigation or other regulatory activity.

Adapting our business to the CCPA, the CPRA, their corresponding implementing regulations and to the enhanced privacy obligations in the E.U. and elsewhere could continue to involve substantial expense and may cause us to divert resources from other aspects of our operations, all of which may adversely affect our business. Further, adaptation of the digital advertising marketplace requires increasingly significant collaboration between participants in the market, such as publishers and advertisers. Failure of the industry to adapt to changes required for operating under laws including the CCPA, CPRA and the GDPR and user response to such changes could negatively impact inventory, data, and demand. We cannot control or predict the pace or effectiveness of such adaptation, and we cannot currently predict the impact such changes may have on our business.

Finally, because the interpretation and application of many privacy and data protection laws (including the GDPR), commercial frameworks, and standards are uncertain, it is possible that these laws, frameworks, and standards may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our existing data management practices or the features of our solutions. If so, in addition to the possibility of fines, lawsuits, breach of contract claims, and other claims and penalties, we could be required to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or modify our solutions, which could have an adverse effect on our business. Any inability to adequately address privacy and security concerns, even if unfounded, or comply with applicable privacy and security or data security laws, regulations, and policies, could result in additional cost and liability to us, damage our reputation, inhibit sales, and adversely affect our business.

Concerns regarding data privacy and security relating to our industry’s technology and practices, and perceived failure to comply with laws and industry self-regulation, could damage our reputation and deter current and potential customers from using our products and services.

Public perception regarding data protection and privacy are significant in the digital advertising ecosystem. Any perception of our practices, products, or services as a violation of individual privacy rights may subject us to public criticism, loss of customers, partners, or vendors, class action lawsuits, reputational harm, or investigations or claims by regulators, industry groups or other third parties, all of which could significantly disrupt our business and expose us to increased liability. Concerns about industry practices with regard to the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information, whether or not valid and whether driven by applicable laws and regulations, industry standards, customer or inventory provider expectations, or the broader public, may harm our reputation, result in loss of goodwill, and inhibit use of our platform by current and future customers. For example, perception that our practices involve an invasion of privacy, whether or not such practices are

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consistent with current or future laws, regulations, or industry practices, may subject us to public criticism, private class actions, reputational harm, or claims by regulators, which could disrupt our business and expose us to increased liability. Data protection laws around the world often take a principled, risk-based approach to information security and require “reasonable”, “appropriate” or “adequate” technical and organizational security measures, meaning that the interpretation and application of those laws are often uncertain and evolving, and there can be no assurance that our security measures will be deemed adequate or reasonable in all instances. Moreover, even security measures that are deemed appropriate, reasonable, and/or in accordance with applicable legal requirements may not be able to protect the information we maintain and may still be viewed negatively by current and potential customers.

Separately, we cannot anticipate unique client certifications or contractual requirements related to security practices, the processing of personal information or of customer confidential information, which could cause us to lose or not obtain new business if we do not have such certifications or meet contractual requirements.

Operating in multiple countries requires us to comply with different legal and regulatory requirements.

Our international operations subject us to laws and regulations of multiple jurisdictions, as well as U.S. laws governing international operations, which are often evolving and sometimes conflict. For example, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”), and comparable foreign laws and regulations (including the U.K. Bribery Act) prohibit improper payments or offers of payments to foreign governments and their officials and political parties by U.S. and other business entities for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business. Some of the countries into which we are, or potentially may, expand score unfavorably on the Corruption Perceptions Index (the “CPI”), of the Transparency International. Other laws and regulations prohibit bribery of private parties and other forms of corruption. Furthermore, we are subject to various U.S. export control and trade and economic sanctions laws and regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and the various sanctions programs administered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (collectively, “Trade Controls”). Trade Controls may prohibit the shipment of specified products and services to certain countries, governments, and persons. Complying with Trade Controls may also be time-consuming and may result in the delay or loss of opportunities. Some regulations also prevent us from engaging with certain individuals or any companies affiliated with these individuals. As we expand our international operations, we will be subject to increased risk of unauthorized payment or offers of payment or other inappropriate conduct by one of our employees, consultants, agents, or other contractors, including by persons engaged or employed by a business we acquire, as well as increased risk of prohibited dealings with certain countries, governments and persons. Any of these could result in violation by us of various laws, including the FCPA and Trade Controls. While we anticipate implementing safeguards to discourage these practices prior to this offering, such safeguards may prove to be ineffective. Any violations of the FCPA, Trade Controls and other similar laws may result in severe criminal or civil sanctions, or other liabilities or proceedings against us, including class action lawsuits and enforcement actions from the SEC, Department of Justice, and foreign regulators and could also harm our reputation. Other laws applicable to our international business include local employment, tax, privacy, data security, and intellectual property protection laws and regulations, including restrictions on movement of information about individuals beyond national borders. In particular, as explained in more detail elsewhere in this prospectus, the GDPR imposes substantial compliance obligations and increases the risks associated with collection and processing of personal data. In some cases, our customers and partners operating in non-U.S. markets may impose additional requirements on our non-U.S. business in efforts to comply with their interpretation of their own or our legal obligations. These requirements may differ significantly from the requirements applicable to our business in the U.S. and may require engineering, infrastructure and other costly resources to accommodate, and may result in decreased operational efficiencies and performance. As these laws continue to evolve and we expand to more jurisdictions or acquire new businesses, compliance will become more complex and expensive, and the risk of non-compliance will increase. Compliance with complex foreign and U.S. laws and regulations that apply to our international operations increases our cost of doing business abroad, and violation of these laws or regulations may interfere with our ability to offer our solution competitively in one or more countries, expose us or our employees to fines and penalties, and result in the limitation or prohibition of

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our conduct of business. In addition, we have recently received numerous inquiries from foreign regulators, including in Australia and the U.K., asking for information about digital advertising generally, programmatic advertising, and the influence of dominant corporations in the digital advertising ecosystem, such as Google and Facebook. These investigations are costly and time consuming to respond to and divert management attention.

Uncertainty caused by lack of uniformity among laws to which we are or may become subject and instability in the global legal landscape may cause us to incur additional or unexpected costs and legal risk, increase our risk of reputational harm, or cause us to change our platform or business model.

We cannot predict the future of the regulatory landscape regarding the protection of personal information. U.S. (state, federal and local) and foreign governments are considering enacting additional legislation related to privacy and data protection and we expect to see an increase in, or changes to, legislation and regulation in this area. There are numerous federal, state, local and international laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, information security and the storing, sharing, use, processing, transfer, disclosure, retention, and protection of personal information and other content, the scope of which is rapidly changing, subject to differing interpretations and may be inconsistent among countries and states, or conflict with other rules. For example, in the U.S., a federal privacy law is the subject of active discussion and several bills have been introduced. Additionally, industry groups in the U.S. and their international counterparts have self-regulatory guidelines that are subject to periodic updates to which we have agreed to adhere. High profile incidents involving breaches of personal information or misuse of consumer information may increase the likelihood of new U.S. federal, state, or international laws or regulations in addition to those set out above, and such laws and regulations may be inconsistent across jurisdictions. While we have adopted a risk-based approach to minimize our impact from noncompliance, with the proliferation of these regulations, both here in the U.S. and international, there can be no assurances that we will maintain full compliance. We have implemented various features intended to enable our customers to better protect end consumer privacy, but these measures may not alleviate all potential privacy concerns and threats. Even the perception of privacy concerns, whether or not valid, may inhibit use of our platform. Privacy advocacy groups and the technology and other industries are considering various new, additional or different self-regulatory standards that may place additional burdens on us. The costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by these groups’ policies and actions may limit the use and adoption of our platform and reduce overall demand for it, or lead to significant fines, penalties, or liabilities for any noncompliance or loss of any such action. We are also subject to the terms of our privacy policies and contractual obligations to third parties related to privacy, data protection, and information security.

Changes in data residency and cross-border transfer restrictions also impact our operations. For the transfer of personal data from the E.U. to the U.S., we rely upon standard contractual clauses (“SCCs”). SCCs and other mechanisms available to us to validate the transfer of data from the E.U. to the U.S. continue to face criticism from privacy advocates and legal challenges in E.U. courts and may need to be updated or replaced as amended to legitimize the transfer of personal information from the E.U. to the U.S. If successful challenges leave us with no reasonable option for the lawful cross-border transfer of personal data, and if we nonetheless continue to transfer personal data from the E.U. to the U.S., that could lead to governmental enforcement actions, litigation, fines, and penalties or adverse publicity, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business or cause us to need to establish systems to maintain certain data in the E.U., which may involve substantial expense and cause us to divert resources from other aspects of our operations, all of which may adversely affect our business. Other jurisdictions have adopted or are considering cross-border or data residency restrictions, which could reduce the amount of data we can collect or process and, as a result, significantly impact our business. It remains unclear how the recent withdrawal of the U.K. from the E.U., referred to as Brexit, will affect cross-border data flows, regulators’ jurisdiction over our business, and other matters related to how we do business and how we comply with applicable data protection laws. Although we will apply the guidance from the Department of Commerce regarding post-Brexit data transfers from the U.K. through Privacy Shield, it remains uncertain whether other methods of transfer will have to be implemented. Accordingly, we cannot predict the additional expense, impact on revenue, or other business impact that may stem from Brexit.

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Additionally, as the digital marketing industry evolves and new ways of collecting, combining and using data are created, governments may enact legislation in response to technological advancements and changes that could result in our having to re-design features or functions of our platform, therefore incurring unexpected compliance costs.

These laws and other obligations may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our existing data management practices or the features of our platform. If so, in addition to the possibility of fines, lawsuits, and other claims, we could be required to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or modify our products, which could have an adverse effect on our business. For example, jurisdictions may require data localization and reconfiguring of our infrastructure, which would create costs and create inefficiencies. If we are required to silo data (and are limited in leveraging all the data collected across all customers in all locations), our solutions may be not as effective or accurate. Additionally, we may be unable to make such changes and modifications in a commercially reasonable manner or at all, and our ability to develop new products and features could be limited. All of this could impair our or our customers’ ability to collect, use, or disclose information relating to consumers, which could decrease demand for our platform, increase our costs, and impair our ability to maintain and grow our customer base and increase our revenue.

We are subject to taxation in multiple jurisdictions. Any adverse development in the tax laws of any of these jurisdictions or any disagreement with our tax positions could have a material and adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations.

We are subject to taxation in, and to the tax laws and regulations of, multiple jurisdictions as a result of the international scope of our operations and our corporate entity structure. We are also subject to transfer pricing laws with respect to our intercompany transactions, including those relating to the flow of funds among our companies. For example, many of the jurisdictions in which we conduct business have detailed transfer pricing rules which require that all transactions with non-resident related parties be priced using arm’s length pricing principles. Contemporaneous documentation must exist to support this pricing. The tax authorities in these jurisdictions could challenge whether our related party transfer pricing policies are at arm’s length and, as a consequence, challenge our tax treatment of corresponding expenses and income. International transfer pricing is an area of taxation that depends heavily on the underlying facts and circumstances and generally involves a significant degree of judgment. If any of these tax authorities were successful in challenging our transfer pricing policies, we may be liable for additional corporate income tax, and penalties, fines, and interest related thereto, which may have a significant impact on our effective tax rate, results of operations, and future cash flows.

Adverse developments in these laws or regulations, or any change in position regarding the application, administration or interpretation thereof, in any applicable jurisdiction, could have a material and adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations. Changes in tax laws, such as tax reform in the U.S. or changes in tax laws resulting from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s multi-jurisdictional plan of action to address “base erosion and profit shifting,” could impact our effective tax rate. In addition, the tax authorities in any applicable jurisdiction, including the U.S., may disagree with the positions we have taken or intend to take regarding the tax treatment or characterization of any of our transactions. If any applicable tax authorities, including U.S. tax authorities, were to successfully challenge the tax treatment or characterization of any of our transactions, it could have a material and adverse effect on our business, financial condition, or results of operations.

Taxing authorities may successfully assert that we should have collected or in the future should collect sales and use, value added or similar taxes, and we could be subject to liability with respect to past or future sales, which could adversely affect our results of operations.

In certain cases, we have concluded that we do not need to collect sales and use, value added and similar taxes in jurisdictions in which we have sales. Sales and use, value added and similar tax laws and rates vary greatly by jurisdiction. Certain jurisdictions in which we do not collect such taxes may assert that such taxes are

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applicable, which could result in tax assessments, penalties, and interest, and we may be required to collect such taxes in the future. Such tax assessments, penalties and interest or future requirements may adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.

Our annual effective income tax rate can change materially as a result of changes in our mix of U.S. and foreign earnings and other factors, including changes in tax laws and changes made by regulatory authorities.

Our overall effective rate is equal to our total tax expense as a percentage of total earnings before tax. However, income tax expense and benefits are not recognized on a global basis but rather on a jurisdictional or legal entity basis. Losses in one jurisdiction might not be useable to offset profits in other jurisdictions, which may cause an increase in our effective tax rate. Changes in statutory tax rates and laws, as well as audits by domestic and international authorities, could affect the amount of income taxes and other taxes paid by us. Changes in the mix of earnings (or losses) between jurisdictions and assumptions used in the calculation of income taxes, among other factors, could have a significant effect on our overall effective income tax rate.

Risks Related to Being a Public Company

We have identified material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting. If we are unable to remediate the material weaknesses in a timely manner, if we identify additional material weaknesses or fail to design and maintain effective internal control over financial reporting, our ability to accurately report our financial condition and results of operations on a timely basis or comply with applicable laws and regulations could be impaired, which may adversely affect investor confidence and, as a result, the value of our common stock.

In connection with the preparation of our consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019, we identified material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting. A material weakness is a deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of our annual or interim financial statements will not be prevented or detected on a timely basis.

Management identified the following material weaknesses:

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These deficiencies described above did not result in a misstatement to our annual consolidated financial statements. However, each of the material weaknesses described above, if not remediated, could impact maintaining effective segregation of duties, as well as the effectiveness of IT-dependent controls (such as automated controls that address the risk of material misstatement to one or more assertions, along with the IT controls and underlying data that support the effectiveness of system-generated data and reports) and result in a misstatement of one or more account balances or disclosures that would result in a material misstatement to the annual or interim consolidated financial statements that would not be prevented or detected, and, accordingly, we determined that these control deficiencies constitute material weaknesses.

We will take certain measures to remediate these material weaknesses, including:

We have begun to implement accounting policies with respect to maintaining evidence in the operation of control procedures and also begun to implement appropriate segregation of duties in the operation of manual controls. The material weaknesses will not be considered remediated until management completes the design and implementation of the measures described in the bullet points above and the controls operate for a sufficient period of time and management has concluded, through testing, that these controls are effective.

We are working to remediate the material weaknesses as efficiently and effectively as possible and expect full remediation could potentially go beyond December 31, 2022. At this time, we cannot provide an estimate of costs expected to be incurred in connection with implementing this remediation plan; however, these remediation measures will be time consuming, incur significant costs, and place significant demands on our financial and operational resources.

We cannot assure that the measures we have taken to date, and that we plan to take, will be sufficient to remediate the material weaknesses we have identified or to avoid additional material weaknesses in future periods. If the measures taken do not remediate the material weaknesses in a timely manner, a reasonable possibility will remain that these or other control deficiencies could result in a material misstatement of our annual or interim consolidated financial statements that would not be prevented or detected on a timely basis.

Starting with our second Form 10-K, and subject to our status as an emerging growth company, management may be required to issue a report on our internal control over financial reporting. If we are unable to assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of our common stock could be adversely affected and we could become subject to litigation or investigations by the stock exchange on which our securities are listed, the SEC, or other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources.

We are an “emerging growth company” and we expect to elect to comply with reduced public company reporting requirements, which could make our common stock less attractive to investors.

We are an “emerging growth company,” as defined in the JOBS Act. For as long as we continue to be an emerging growth company, we are eligible for certain exemptions from various public company reporting requirements. These exemptions include, but are not limited to, (i) not being required to comply with the auditor

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attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, (ii) reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports, proxy statements and registration statements, (iii) exemptions from the requirements of holding a nonbinding advisory vote on executive compensation and shareholder approval of any golden parachute payments not previously approved and (iv) not being required to provide audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2018, or five years of Selected Consolidated Financial Data, in this prospectus. We could be an emerging growth company for up to five years after the first sale of our common stock pursuant to an effective registration statement under the Securities Act, which fifth anniversary will occur in 2026. However, if certain events occur prior to the end of such five-year period, including if we become a “large accelerated filer,” our annual gross revenue exceeds $1.07 billion or we issue more than $1.0 billion of non-convertible debt in any three-year period, we would cease to be an emerging growth company prior to the end of such five-year period. We have made certain elections with regard to the reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in this prospectus and may elect to take advantage of other reduced disclosure obligations in future filings. As a result, the information that we provide to holders of our common stock may be different than you might receive from other public reporting companies in which you hold equity interests. We cannot predict if investors will find our common stock less attractive as a result of our reliance on these exemptions. If some investors find our common stock less attractive as a result of any choice we make to reduce disclosure, there may be a less active trading market for our common stock and the market price for our common stock may be more volatile.

Under the JOBS Act, emerging growth companies may also elect to delay adoption of new or revised accounting standards until such time as those standards apply to private companies. We have elected to “opt-in” to this extended transition period for complying with new or revised accounting standards and, therefore, we will not be subject to the same new or revised accounting standards as other public companies that comply with such new or revised accounting standards on a non-delayed basis. Our financial statements may not be comparable to companies that comply with public company effective dates because of this election.

The requirements of being a public company may strain our resources and distract our management, which could make it difficult to manage our business, particularly after we are no longer an “emerging growth company.”

As a public company, we will incur incremental legal, governance, accounting, and other expenses. We will become subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the listing requirements of                 and other applicable securities rules and regulations. Compliance with these rules and regulations will increase our legal and financial compliance costs, make some activities more difficult, time-consuming or costly and increase demand on our systems and resources, particularly after we are no longer an “emerging growth company.” The Exchange Act requires that we file annual, quarterly, and current reports with respect to our business, financial condition and results of operations. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we establish and maintain effective internal controls and procedures for financial reporting. Furthermore, the need to establish the corporate infrastructure demanded of a public company may divert our management’s attention from implementing our growth strategy, which could prevent us from improving our business, financial condition, and results of operations. We have made, and will continue to make, changes to our internal controls and procedures for financial reporting and accounting systems to meet our reporting obligations as a public company. However, the measures we take may not be sufficient to satisfy our obligations as a public company. In addition, these rules and regulations will increase our legal and financial compliance costs and will make some activities more time-consuming and costly. For example, we expect these rules and regulations to make it more difficult and more expensive for us to obtain director and officer liability insurance, and we may be required to incur substantial costs to maintain the same or similar coverage. These additional obligations could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

In addition, changing laws, regulations, and standards relating to corporate governance and public disclosure are creating uncertainty for public companies, increasing legal and financial compliance costs, and making some

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activities more time consuming. These laws, regulations and standards are subject to varying interpretations, in many cases due to their lack of specificity, and, as a result, their application in practice may evolve over time as new guidance is provided by regulatory and governing bodies. This could result in continuing uncertainty regarding compliance matters and higher costs necessitated by ongoing revisions to disclosure and governance practices. We intend to invest resources to comply with evolving laws, regulations and standards, and this investment may result in increased general and administrative expenses and a diversion of our management’s time and attention from sales-generating activities to compliance activities. If our efforts to comply with new laws, regulations and standards differ from the activities intended by regulatory or governing bodies due to ambiguities related to their application and practice, regulatory authorities may initiate legal proceedings against us and could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

If we fail to maintain an effective system of internal control over financial reporting in the future, we may not be able to accurately or timely report our financial condition or results of operations. If our internal control over financial reporting is not effective, it may adversely affect investor confidence in us and the price of our common stock.

As a public company, we are required to maintain internal control over financial reporting and to report any material weaknesses in such internal control. Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires that we evaluate and determine the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting and provide a management report on our internal control over financial reporting.

Our platform system applications are complex, multi-faceted and include applications that are highly customized in order to serve and support our customers, advertising inventory and data suppliers, as well as support our financial reporting obligations. We regularly make improvements to our platform to maintain and enhance our competitive position. In the future, we may implement new offerings and engage in business transactions, such as acquisitions, reorganizations or implementation of new information systems. These factors require us to develop and maintain our internal controls, processes, and reporting systems, and we expect to incur ongoing costs in this effort. We may not be successful in developing and maintaining effective internal controls, and any failure to develop or maintain effective controls, or any difficulties encountered in their implementation or improvement, could harm our operating results or cause us to fail to meet our reporting obligations and may result in a restatement of our financial statements for prior periods.

Our management team has limited experience managing a public company.

Most members of our management team have limited experience managing a publicly traded company, interacting with public company investors, and complying with the increasingly complex laws, rules, and regulations that govern public companies. As a public company, we are subject to significant obligations relating to reporting, procedures and internal controls, and our management team may not successfully or efficiently manage such obligations. These obligations and scrutiny will require significant attention from our management and could divert their attention away from the day-to-day management of our business, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

If we are unable to attract, integrate and retain additional qualified personnel, including top technical talent, our business could be adversely affected.

Our future success and our ability to maintain and grow the IAS product portfolio depends in part on our ability to identify, attract, integrate, and retain highly skilled technical, managerial, sales, and other personnel, including top technical talent from the industry. We face intense competition for qualified individuals from numerous other companies, including other companies in the digital ad ecosystem, many of whom have greater financial and other resources than we do. These companies also may provide more diverse opportunities and better chances for career advancement. Some of these characteristics may be more appealing to high-quality candidates than those we have to offer. In addition, new hires often require significant training and, in many

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cases, take significant time before they achieve full productivity. We may incur significant costs to attract and retain qualified personnel, including significant expenditures related to salaries and benefits and compensation expenses related to equity awards and we may lose new employees to our competitors or other companies before we realize the benefit of our investment in recruiting and training them. Moreover, new employees may not be or become as productive as we expect, as we may face challenges in adequately or appropriately integrating them into our workforce and culture.

In addition, as we move into new geographies, we will need to attract and recruit skilled personnel in those areas. Specifically, as our operations in India grow substantially, we may have difficulty finding and retaining software engineers in India. There is intense competition in India for skilled technical professionals, and we expect such competition to increase. As a result, we may be unable to cost-effectively retain our current employee base in India or hire additional new talent.

Failure to attract sufficiently skilled engineers in India will have a materially adverse effect on our growth plans. We generally may face challenges in attracting, integrating, and retaining international employees. If we are unable to attract, integrate, and retain suitably qualified individuals who are capable of meeting our growing technical, operational and managerial requirements, on a timely basis or at all, our business will be adversely affected.

Risks Relating to Our Indebtedness

Our existing indebtedness could adversely affect our business and growth prospects.

As of March 31, 2021, we had total current and long-term indebtedness of $                million, including (i) $                million outstanding under our Term Loan Facility, pursuant to the Credit Agreement, (ii) $                million outstanding under our Revolving Credit Facility, and (iii) $                 million of outstanding letters of credit. In addition, as of March 31, 2021, we had $                 million of additional borrowing capacity under our Revolving Credit Facility. All obligations under the Credit Agreement are secured by first-priority perfected security interests in substantially all of our assets and the assets of our domestic subsidiaries, subject to permitted liens and other exceptions. Our indebtedness, or any additional indebtedness we may incur, could require us to divert funds identified for other purposes for debt service and impair our liquidity position. If we cannot generate sufficient cash flow from operations to service our debt, we may need to refinance our debt, dispose of assets, or issue equity to obtain necessary funds. We do not know whether we will be able to take any of these actions on a timely basis, on terms satisfactory to us or at all.

Our indebtedness, the cash flow needed to satisfy our debt and the covenants contained in our Credit Agreement have important consequences, including:

Our level of indebtedness may place us at a competitive disadvantage to our competitors that are not as highly leveraged. Fluctuations in interest rates can increase borrowing costs. Increases in interest rates may directly impact the amount of interest we are required to pay and reduce earnings accordingly. In addition, developments in tax policy, such as the disallowance of tax deductions for interest paid on outstanding indebtedness, could have an adverse effect on our liquidity and our business, financial conditions, and results of operations. Further, our Credit Agreement contain customary affirmative and negative covenants and certain

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restrictions on operations that could impose operating and financial limitations and restrictions on us, including restrictions on our ability to enter into particular transactions and to engage in other actions that we may believe are advisable or necessary for our business. Our Term Loan Facility is also subject to mandatory prepayments in certain circumstances, including a requirement to make a prepayment with a certain percentage of our excess cash flow. This excess cash flow payment, and other future required prepayments, will reduce our cash available for investment in our business.

Interest rates under the Credit Agreement are based partly on the London interbank offered rate (“LIBOR”) the basic rate of interest used in lending between banks on the London interbank market and is widely used as a reference for setting the interest rate on loans globally. LIBOR is currently expected to be phased out by the middle of 2023. The U.S. Federal Reserve has begun publishing a Secured Overnight Funding Rate which is currently intended to serve as an alternative reference rate to LIBOR. If the method for calculation of LIBOR changes, if LIBOR is no longer available, or if lenders have increased costs due to changes in LIBOR, we may suffer from potential increases in interest rates on our borrowings. Further, we may need to renegotiate our agreements or any other borrowings that utilize LIBOR as a factor in determining the interest rate to replace LIBOR with the new standard that is established.

We expect to use cash flow from operations to meet current and future financial obligations, including funding our operations, debt service requirements, and capital expenditures. The ability to make these payments depends on our financial and operating performance, which is subject to prevailing economic, industry, and competitive conditions and to certain financial, business, economic, and other factors beyond our control.

Despite current indebtedness levels and restrictive covenants, we may still be able to incur substantially more indebtedness or make certain restricted payments, which could further exacerbate the risks associated with our substantial indebtedness.

We may be able to incur significant additional indebtedness in the future. Although the financing documents governing our Credit Agreement contain restrictions on the incurrence of additional indebtedness and liens, these restrictions are subject to a number of important qualifications and exceptions, and the additional indebtedness and liens incurred in compliance with these restrictions could be substantial.

The financing documents governing our Credit Agreement permits us to incur certain additional indebtedness, including liabilities that do not constitute indebtedness as defined in the financing documents. We may also consider investments in joint ventures or acquisitions, which may increase our indebtedness. In addition, financing documents governing our Credit Agreement does not restrict our Sponsor from creating new holding companies that may be able to incur indebtedness without regard to the restrictions set forth in the financing documents governing our Credit Agreement. If new debt is added to our currently anticipated indebtedness levels, the related risks that we face could intensify.

We may not be able to generate sufficient cash flow to service all of our indebtedness, and may be forced to take other actions to satisfy our obligations under such indebtedness, which may not be successful.

Our ability to make scheduled payments or to refinance outstanding debt obligations depends on our financial and operating performance, which will be affected by prevailing economic, industry, and competitive conditions and by financial, business, and other factors beyond our control. We may not be able to maintain a sufficient level of cash flow from operating activities to permit us to pay the principal, premium, if any, and interest on our indebtedness. Any failure to make payments of interest and principal on our outstanding indebtedness on a timely basis would likely result in a reduction of our credit rating, which would also harm our ability to incur additional indebtedness.

If our cash flows and capital resources are insufficient to fund our debt service obligations, we may be forced to reduce or delay capital expenditures, sell assets, seek additional capital, or seek to restructure or

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refinance our indebtedness. Any refinancing of our indebtedness could be at higher interest rates and may require us to comply with more onerous covenants. These alternative measures may not be successful and may not permit us to meet our scheduled debt service obligations. In the absence of such cash flows and resources, we could face substantial liquidity problems and might be required to sell material assets or operations to attempt to meet our debt service obligations. The financing documents governing our Credit Agreement includes certain restrictions on our ability to conduct asset sales and/or use the proceeds from asset sales for general corporate purposes. We may not be able to consummate these asset sales to raise capital or sell assets at prices and on terms that we believe are fair and any proceeds that we do receive may not be adequate to meet any debt service obligations then due. If we cannot meet our debt service obligations, the holders of our indebtedness may accelerate such indebtedness and, to the extent such indebtedness is secured, foreclose on our assets. In such an event, we may not have sufficient assets to repay all of our indebtedness.

The terms of the financing documents governing our Term Loan Facility restrict our current and future operations, particularly our ability to respond to changes or to take certain actions.

The financing documents governing our Term Loan Facility contain a number of restrictive covenants that impose significant operating and financial restrictions on us and may limit our ability to engage in acts that may be in our long-term best interests, including restrictions on our ability to:

You should read the discussion under the heading “Description of Certain Indebtedness” for further information about these covenants.

The restrictive covenants in the financing documents governing our Credit Agreement require us to maintain specified financial ratios and satisfy other financial condition tests to the extent applicable. Our ability to meet those financial ratios and tests can be affected by events beyond our control.

A breach of the covenants or restrictions under the financing documents governing our Credit Agreement could result in an event of default under such documents. Such a default may allow the creditors to accelerate the related debt, which may result in the acceleration of any other debt to which a cross-acceleration or cross-default provision applies. In the event the holders of our indebtedness accelerate the repayment, we may not have sufficient assets to repay that indebtedness or be able to borrow sufficient funds to refinance it. Even if we are able to obtain new financing, it may not be on commercially reasonable terms or on terms acceptable to us. As a result of these restrictions, we may be:

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These restrictions, along with restrictions that may be contained in agreements evidencing or governing other future indebtedness, may affect our ability to grow in accordance with our growth strategy.

The phase-out of the LIBOR, or the replacement of LIBOR with a different reference rate, may adversely affect interest rates.

Borrowings under our Credit Agreement bear interest at rates determined using LIBOR, the basic rate of interest used in lending between banks on the London interbank market and is widely used as a reference for setting the interest rate on loans globally. LIBOR is currently expected to be phased out by the middle of 2023. The U.S. Federal Reserve has begun publishing a Secured Overnight Funding Rate which is currently intended to serve as an alternative reference rate to LIBOR. If the method for calculation of LIBOR changes, if LIBOR is no longer available, or if lenders have increased costs due to changes in LIBOR, we may suffer from potential increases in interest rates on our borrowings. Further, we may need to renegotiate our Credit Agreement to replace LIBOR with the new standard that is established.

We may be unable to refinance our indebtedness.

We may need to refinance all or a portion of our indebtedness before maturity. We cannot assure you that we will be able to refinance any of our indebtedness on commercially reasonable terms or at all. There can be no assurance that we will be able to obtain sufficient funds to enable us to repay or refinance our debt obligations on commercially reasonable terms, or at all.

Our failure to raise additional capital or generate cash flows necessary to expand our operations and invest in new technologies in the future could reduce our ability to compete successfully and harm our results of operations.

We may need to raise additional funds, and we may not be able to obtain additional debt or equity financing on favorable terms or at all. If we raise additional equity financing, our security holders may experience significant dilution of their ownership interests. If we engage in additional debt financing, we may be required to accept terms that restrict our ability to incur additional indebtedness, force us to maintain specified liquidity or other ratios or restrict our ability to pay dividends or make acquisitions. If we need additional capital and cannot raise it on acceptable terms, or at all, we may not be able to, among other things:

In addition, our Term Loan Facility also limits our ability to incur additional debt and therefore we likely would have to amend our Term Loan Facility or issue additional equity to raise capital. If we issue additional equity, your interest in us will be diluted.

Risks Related to Ownership of Our Common Stock and This Offering

Vista controls us, and its interests may conflict with ours or yours in the future.

Immediately following this offering, Vista will beneficially own approximately                 % of our common stock, or                % if the underwriters exercise in full their option to purchase additional shares, which means that, based on its percentage voting power held after the offering, Vista will control the vote of all matters submitted to a vote of our board of directors, or our Board, or shareholders, which will enable it to control the

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election of the members of the Board and all other corporate decisions. In addition, our bylaws will provide that Vista will have the right to designate the Chairman of the Board for so long as Vista beneficially owns at least                % or more of the voting power of the then outstanding shares of our capital stock then entitled to vote generally in the election of directors. Even when Vista ceases to own shares of our stock representing a majority of the total voting power, for so long as Vista continues to own a significant portion of our stock, Vista will still be able to significantly influence the composition of our Board, including the right to designate the Chairman of our Board, and the approval of actions requiring shareholder approval. Accordingly, for such period of time, Vista will have significant influence with respect to our management, business plans, and policies, including the appointment and removal of our officers, decisions on whether to raise future capital and amending our charter and bylaws, which govern the rights attached to our common stock. In particular, for so long as Vista continues to own a significant percentage of our stock, Vista will be able to cause or prevent a change of control of us or a change in the composition of our Board, including the selection of the Chairman of our Board, and could preclude any unsolicited acquisition of us. The concentration of ownership could deprive you of an opportunity to receive a premium for your shares of common stock as part of a sale of us and ultimately might affect the market price of our common stock.

In addition, in connection with this offering, we will enter into a Director Nomination Agreement with Vista that provides Vista the right to designate: (i) all of the nominees for election to our Board for so long as Vista beneficially owns 40% or more of the total number of shares of our common stock it owns as of the date of this offering; (ii) a number of directors (rounded up to the nearest whole number) equal to 40% of the total directors for so long as Vista beneficially owns at least 30% and less than 40% of the total number of shares of our common stock it owns as of the date of this offering; (iii) a number of directors (rounded up to the nearest whole number) equal to 30% of the total directors for so long as Vista beneficially owns at least 20% and less than 30% of the total number of shares of our common stock it owns as of the date of this offering; (iv) a number of directors (rounded up to the nearest whole number) equal to 20% of the total directors for so long as Vista beneficially owns at least 10% and less than 20% of the total number of shares of our common stock it owns as of the date of this offering; and (v) one director for so long as Vista beneficially owns at least 5% and less than 10% of the total number of shares of our common stock it owns as of the date of this offering. The Director Nomination Agreement will also provide that Vista may assign such right to a Vista affiliate. The Director Nomination Agreement will prohibit us from increasing or decreasing the size of our Board without the prior written consent of Vista. See “Certain Relationships and Related Party Transactions — Related Party Transactions — Director Nomination Agreement” for more details with respect to the Director Nomination Agreement.

Vista and its affiliates engage in a broad spectrum of activities, including investments in the information and business services industry generally. In the ordinary course of their business activities, Vista and its affiliates may engage in activities where their interests conflict with our interests or those of our other shareholders, such as investing in or advising businesses that directly or indirectly compete with certain portions of our business or are suppliers or customers of ours. Our certificate of incorporation to be effective in connection with the closing of this offering will provide that none of Vista, any of its affiliates or any director who is not employed by us (including any non-employee director who serves as one of our officers in both his director and officer capacities) or its affiliates will have any duty to refrain from engaging, directly or indirectly, in the same business activities or similar business activities or lines of business in which we operate. Vista also may pursue acquisition opportunities that may be complementary to our business, and, as a result, those acquisition opportunities may not be available to us. In addition, Vista may have an interest in pursuing acquisitions, divestitures and other transactions that, in its judgment, could enhance its investment, even though such transactions might involve risks to you.

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Upon listing of our shares on the                 , we will be a “controlled company” within the meaning of the rules of the                 and, as a result, we will qualify for, and intend to rely on, exemptions from certain corporate governance requirements. You will not have the same protections as those afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to such governance requirements.

After completion of this offering, the Vista Funds will continue to control a majority of the voting power of our outstanding common stock. As a result, we will be a “controlled company” within the meaning of the corporate governance standards of the                . Under these rules, a company of which more than 50% of the voting power for the election of directors is held by an individual, group or another company is a “controlled company” and may elect not to comply with certain corporate governance requirements, including:

Following this offering, we intend to utilize these exemptions. As a result, we may not have a majority of independent directors on our Board, our Compensation and Nominating Committee may not consist entirely of independent directors and our Compensation and Nominating Committee may not be subject to annual performance evaluations. Accordingly, you will not have the same protections afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to all of the corporate governance requirements of the                .

An active, liquid trading market for our common stock may not develop, which may limit your ability to sell your shares.

Prior to this offering, there was no public market for our common stock. Although we have been approved to list our common stock on the                under the symbol “                 ,” an active trading market for our shares may never develop or be sustained following this offering. The initial public offering price will be determined by negotiations between us and the underwriters and may not be indicative of market prices of our common stock that will prevail in the open market after the offering. A public trading market having the desirable characteristics of depth, liquidity, and orderliness depends upon the existence of willing buyers and sellers at any given time, such existence being dependent upon the individual decisions of buyers and sellers over which neither we nor any market maker has control. The failure of an active and liquid trading market to develop and continue would likely have a material adverse effect on the value of our common stock. The market price of our common stock may decline below the initial public offering price, and you may not be able to sell your shares of our common stock at or above the price you paid in this offering, or at all. An inactive market may also impair our ability to raise capital to continue to fund operations by issuing shares and may impair our ability to acquire other companies or technologies by using our shares as consideration.

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Provisions of our corporate governance documents could make an acquisition of us more difficult and may prevent attempts by our shareholders to replace or remove our current management, even if beneficial to our shareholders.

In addition to Vista’s beneficial ownership of                 % of our common stock after this offering (or                %, if the underwriters exercise in full their option to purchase additional shares), our certificate of incorporation and bylaws to be effective in connection with the closing of this offering and the Delaware General Corporation Law (the “DGCL”), contain provisions that could make it more difficult for a third party to acquire us, even if doing so might be beneficial to our shareholders. Among other things:

Our certificate of incorporation to be effective in connection with the closing of this offering will contain a provision that provides us with protections similar to Section 203 of the DGCL, and will prevent us from engaging in a business combination with a person (excluding Vista and any of its direct or indirect transferees and any group as to which such persons are a party) who acquires at least 15% of our common stock for a period of three years from the date such person acquired such common stock, unless board or shareholder approval is obtained prior to the acquisition. See “Description of Capital Stock — Anti-Takeover Effects of Our Certificate of Incorporation and Our Bylaws.” These provisions could discourage, delay or prevent a transaction involving a change in control of our company. These provisions could also discourage proxy contests and make it more difficult for you and other shareholders to elect directors of your choosing and cause us to take other corporate actions you desire, including actions that you may deem advantageous, or negatively affect the trading price of our common stock. In addition, because our Board is responsible for appointing the members of our management team, these provisions could in turn affect any attempt by our shareholders to replace current members of our management team.

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These and other provisions in our certificate of incorporation, bylaws and Delaware law could make it more difficult for shareholders or potential acquirers to obtain control of our Board or initiate actions that are opposed by our then-current Board, including delay or impede a merger, tender offer or proxy contest involving our company. The existence of these provisions could negatively affect the price of our common stock and limit opportunities for you to realize value in a corporate transaction.

For information regarding these and other provisions, see “Description of Capital Stock.”

Our certificate of incorporation will designate the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware as the exclusive forum for certain litigation that may be initiated by our shareholders and the federal district courts of the United States as the exclusive forum for litigation arising under the Securities Act, which could limit our shareholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us.

Pursuant to our certificate of incorporation to be effective in connection with the closing of this offering, unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware will be the sole and exclusive forum for (1) any derivative action or proceeding brought on our behalf, (2) any action asserting a claim of breach of a fiduciary duty owed by any of our directors, officers or other employees to us or our shareholders, (3) any action asserting a claim against us arising pursuant to any provision of the DGCL, our certificate of incorporation or our bylaws or (4) any other action asserting a claim against us that is governed by the internal affairs doctrine; provided that for the avoidance of doubt, the forum selection provision that identifies the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware as the exclusive forum for certain litigation, including any “derivative action”, will not apply to suits to enforce a duty or liability created by Securities Act, the Exchange Act or any other claim for which the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction. Our certificate of incorporation will also provide that unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, the federal district courts of the United States shall be the exclusive forum for the resolutions of any complaint asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act.

Moreover, Section 22 of the Securities Act creates concurrent jurisdiction for federal and state courts over all claims brought to enforce any duty or liability created by the Securities Act or the rules and regulations thereunder and our certificate of incorporation will also provide that, unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum and to the fullest extent permitted by law, the federal district courts of the United States shall be the exclusive forum for the resolution of any complaint asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act. While there can be no assurance that federal or state courts will follow the holding of the Delaware Supreme Court or determine that our federal forum provision should be enforced in a particular case, application of our federal forum provision means that suits brought by our stockholders to enforce any duty or liability created by the Securities Act must be brought in federal court and cannot be brought in state court.

Section 27 of the Exchange Act creates exclusive federal jurisdiction over all claims brought to enforce any duty or liability created by the Exchange Act or the rules and regulations thereunder and our certificate of incorporation will provide that neither the exclusive forum provision nor our federal forum provision applies to suits brought to enforce any duty or liability created by the Exchange Act. Accordingly, actions by our stockholders to enforce any duty or liability created by the Exchange Act or the rules and regulations thereunder must be brought in federal court. Our stockholders will not be deemed to have waived our compliance with the federal securities laws and the regulations promulgated thereunder.

Our certificate of incorporation will further provide that any person or entity purchasing or otherwise acquiring any interest in shares of our capital stock is deemed to have notice of and consented to the provisions of our certificate of incorporation described above. See “Description of Capital Stock — Exclusive Forum”. The forum selection clause in our certificate of incorporation may have the effect of discouraging lawsuits against us or our directors and officers and may limit our shareholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us. If the enforceability of our forum selection provisions were to be challenged, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving such challenge. While we currently have no basis to expect any such

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challenge would be successful, if a court were to find our forum selection provisions to be inapplicable or unenforceable with respect to one or more of these specified types of actions or proceedings, we may incur additional costs associated with having to litigate in other jurisdictions, which could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations, cash flows, and prospects and result in a diversion of the time and resources of our employees, management, and board of directors.

If you purchase shares of common stock in this offering, you will suffer immediate and substantial dilution of your investment.

The initial public offering price of our common stock is substantially higher than the pro forma net tangible book value per share of our common stock. Therefore, if you purchase shares of our common stock in this offering, you will pay a price per share that substantially exceeds our pro forma net tangible book value per share after this offering. Based on an assumed initial public offering price of $                per share, the mid-point of the price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, you will experience immediate dilution of $                per share, representing the difference between our pro forma net tangible book value per share after giving effect to this offering and the initial public offering price. In addition, purchasers of common stock in this offering will have contributed                % of the aggregate price paid by all purchasers of our common stock but will own only approximately                % of our common stock outstanding after this offering. See “Dilution” for more detail.

A significant portion of our total outstanding shares are restricted from immediate resale but may be sold into the market in the near future. This could cause the market price of our common stock to drop significantly, even if our business is doing well.

Sales of a substantial number of shares of our common stock in the public market could occur at any time. These sales, or the perception in the market that the holders of a large number of shares intend to sell shares, could reduce the market price of our common stock. After this offering, we will have                outstanding shares of common stock based on the number of shares outstanding as of March 31, 2021. This includes shares that we are selling in this offering, which may be resold in the public market immediately. Following the consummation of this offering, shares that are not being sold in this offering will be subject to a 180-day lock-up period provided under lock-up agreements executed in connection with this offering described in “Underwriting” and restricted from immediate resale under the federal securities laws as described in “Shares Eligible for Future Sale.” All of these shares will, however, be able to be resold after the expiration of the lock-up period, as well as pursuant to customary exceptions thereto or upon the waiver of the lock-up agreement by Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and Jefferies LLC on behalf of the underwriters. We also intend to register shares of common stock that we may issue under our equity compensation plans. Once we register these shares, they can be freely sold in the public market upon issuance, subject to the lock-up agreements. As restrictions on resale end, the market price of our stock could decline if the holders of currently restricted shares sell them or are perceived by the market as intending to sell them.

Because we have no current plans to pay regular cash dividends on our common stock following this offering, you may not receive any return on investment unless you sell your common stock for a price greater than that which you paid for it.

We do not anticipate paying any regular cash dividends on our common stock following this offering. Any decision to declare and pay dividends in the future will be made at the discretion of our Board and will depend on, among other things, our results of operations, financial condition, cash requirements, contractual restrictions, and other factors that our Board may deem relevant. In addition, our ability to pay dividends is, and may be, limited by covenants of existing and any future outstanding indebtedness we or our subsidiaries incur, including under our Credit Agreement. Therefore, any return on investment in our common stock is solely dependent upon the appreciation of the price of our common stock on the open market, which may not occur. See “Dividend Policy” for more detail.

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If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, if they adversely change their recommendations regarding our shares or if our results of operations do not meet their expectations, our stock price and trading volume could decline.

The trading market for our shares will be influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts publish about us or our business. We do not have any control over these analysts. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of us or fail to publish reports on us regularly, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which in turn could cause our stock price or trading volume to decline. Moreover, if one or more of the analysts who cover us downgrade our stock, or if our results of operations do not meet their expectations, our stock price could decline.

We may issue shares of preferred stock in the future, which could make it difficult for another company to acquire us or could otherwise adversely affect holders of our common stock, which could depress the price of our common stock.

Our certificate of incorporation will authorize us to issue one or more series of preferred stock. Our Board will have the authority to determine the preferences, limitations, and relative rights of the shares of preferred stock and to fix the number of shares constituting any series and the designation of such series, without any further vote or action by our shareholders. Our preferred stock could be issued with voting, liquidation, dividend, and other rights superior to the rights of our common stock. The potential issuance of preferred stock may delay or prevent a change in control of us, discouraging bids for our common stock at a premium to the market price, and materially adversely affect the market price and the voting and other rights of the holders of our common stock.

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FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This prospectus contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this prospectus are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements give our current expectations and projections relating to our financial condition, results of operations, plans, objectives, future performance and business. You can identify forward-looking statements by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts. These statements may include words such as “anticipate,” “estimate,” “expect,” “project,” “plan,” “intend,” “believe,” “may,” “will,” “should,” “can have,” “likely,” and other words and terms of similar meaning in connection with any discussion of the timing or nature of future operating or financial performance or other events. For example, all statements we make relating to our estimated and projected costs, expenditures, cash flows, growth rates and financial results or our plans and objectives for future operations, growth initiatives, or strategies are forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that we expected, including:

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We derive many of our forward-looking statements from our operating budgets and forecasts, which are based on many detailed assumptions. While we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, we caution that it is very difficult to predict the impact of known factors, and it is impossible for us to anticipate all factors that could affect our actual results. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations, or cautionary statements, are disclosed under the sections entitled “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in this prospectus. All written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to us, or persons acting on our behalf, are expressly qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements as well as other cautionary statements that are made from time to time in our other SEC filings and public communications. You should evaluate all forward-looking statements made in this prospectus in the context of these risks and uncertainties.

We caution you that the important factors referenced above may not contain all of the factors that are important to you. In addition, we cannot assure you that we will realize the results or developments we expect or anticipate or, even if substantially realized, that they will result in the consequences or affect us or our operations in the way we expect. The forward-looking statements included in this prospectus are made only as of the date hereof. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law.

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MARKET AND INDUSTRY DATA

Unless otherwise indicated, information in this prospectus concerning economic conditions, our industry, our markets, and our competitive position is based on a variety of sources, including information from independent industry analysts and publications, as well as our own internal estimates and research. This information involves a number of assumptions and limitations, and you are cautioned not to give undue weight to such estimates. We have not independently verified this third-party information. While we believe the information presented in this prospectus is generally reliable, forecasts, assumptions, expectations, beliefs, estimates, and projects involve risk and uncertainties and are subject to change based on various factors, including those described under “Forward-Looking Statements” and “Risk Factors.”

Certain information in the text of this prospectus is contained in independent industry publications. The sources of these independent industry publications are provided below:

Information contained on or accessible through the websites referenced above is not a part of this prospectus and the inclusion of the website addresses referenced above in this prospectus are inactive textual references only.

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USE OF PROCEEDS

We estimate that our net proceeds from this offering will be approximately $                million (or approximately $                 million if the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares is exercised in full), assuming an initial public offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the estimated price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

The principal purposes of this offering are to increase our capitalization and financial flexibility, create a public market for our common stock and enable access to the public equity markets for us and our shareholders. We expect to use approximately $                 million of the net proceeds of this offering (or $                million of the net proceeds of this offering if the underwriters exercise their option to purchase additional shares in full) to repay outstanding borrowings under our Credit Agreement and the remainder of such net proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes. At this time, other than repayment of indebtedness under our Credit Agreement, we have not specifically identified a large single use for which we intend to use the net proceeds and, accordingly, we are not able to allocate the net proceeds among any of these potential uses in light of the variety of factors that will impact how such net proceeds are ultimately utilized by us. Pending use of the proceeds from this offering, we intend to invest the proceeds in a variety of capital preservation investments, including short-term, investment-grade and interest-bearing instruments.

We may also use a portion of our net proceeds to acquire or invest in complementary businesses, products, services or technologies. However, we do not have agreements or commitments for any acquisitions or investments at this time.

Each $1.00 increase or decrease in the assumed initial public offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the estimated public offering price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, would increase or decrease the net proceeds to us from this offering by approximately $                million, assuming the number of shares offered, as set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, remains the same, and after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

Each 1,000,000 increase or decrease in the number of shares offered would increase or decrease the net proceeds to us from this offering by approximately $                 million, assuming that the assumed initial public offering price per share for the offering remains at $                , which is the midpoint of the estimated public offering price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, and after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

Borrowings under the Credit Agreement bear interest at a rate per annum, at the borrower’s option, equal to an applicable margin, plus, (a) for alternate base rate borrowings, the highest of (i) the rate last quoted by The Wall Street Journal as the “prime rate” in the United States, (ii) the Federal Funds Rate in effect on such day plus 1/2 of 1.00% and (iii) the Adjusted LIBOR for a one month interest period on such day plus 1.00% and (b) for eurodollar borrowings, the Adjusted LIBOR determined by the greater of (i) the LIBOR for the relevant interest period divided by 1 minus the statutory reserves (if any) and (ii) 1.00%.

The applicable margin for borrowings under the Credit Agreement is (a) for alternate base rate borrowings, (i) 5.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is greater than 6.50 to 1.00, (ii) 4.50% so long as the total leverage ratio is less than or equal to 6.50 to 1.00 and greater than 5.75 to 1.00 or (iii) 4.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is less or equal to 5.75 to 1.00 and (b) for eurodollar borrowings, (i) 6.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is greater than 6.50 to 1.00, (ii) 5.50% so long as the total leverage ratio is less than or equal to 6.50 to 1.00 and greater than 5.75 to 1.00 or (iii) 5.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is less or equal to 5.75 to 1.00. The total leverage ratio is determined in accordance with the terms of the Credit Agreement.

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The contract interest rate on the Term Loan Facility was     % per annum as of March 31, 2021. The effective interest rate was     % per annum as of March 31, 2021. The Term Loan Facility does not require periodic principal payments.

As of March 31, 2021, the interest rate for the Revolving Credit Facility was     % per annum. As of March 31, 2021, the Company had $                outstanding on the Revolving Credit Facility. The borrower is also required to pay a commitment fee on the average daily undrawn portion of the Revolving Credit Facility of 0.375%-0.50% per annum (varying based on the leverage ratio tiers applicable to the applicable margin as described above), a letter of credit fronting fee of 0.125% per annum and a letter of credit participation fee equal to the applicable margin for eurodollar revolving loans on the actual daily amount of the letter of credit exposure.

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DIVIDEND POLICY

We currently intend to retain all available funds and any future earnings to fund the development and growth of our business and to repay indebtedness and, therefore, we do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. Additionally, our ability to pay dividends on our common stock is limited by restrictions on the ability of our subsidiaries to pay dividends or make distributions to us. Any future determination to pay dividends will be at the discretion of our Board, subject to compliance with covenants in current and future agreements governing our and our subsidiaries’ indebtedness, and will depend on our results of operations, financial condition, capital requirements and other factors that our Board may deem relevant. Additionally, our Credit Agreement place restrictions on the ability of our subsidiaries to pay cash dividends or make distributions to us. See the section titled “Description of Indebtedness.”

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CAPITALIZATION

The following table describes our cash and cash equivalents and capitalization as of March 31, 2021, as follows:

The pro forma as adjusted information set forth in the table below is illustrative only and will be adjusted based on the actual initial public offering price and other terms of this offering determined at pricing. You should read this table in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and the related notes, “Use of Proceeds,” “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and “Corporate Conversion” included elsewhere in this prospectus.

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A $1.00 increase or decrease in the assumed initial public offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, would increase or decrease each of cash and cash equivalents, additional paid-in capital, total shareholders’ equity and total capitalization on pro forma as adjusted basis by approximately $                million, assuming the number of shares offered, as set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, remains the same, and after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

Each 1,000,000 increase or decrease in the number of shares of common stock offered in this offering would increase or decrease each of cash and cash equivalents, additional paid-in capital, total shareholders’ equity (deficit) and total capitalization on pro forma as adjusted basis by approximately $                million, based on an assumed initial public offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the estimated offering price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, and after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

Except as otherwise indicated, the above discussion and table are based on                shares of our common stock outstanding as of March 31, 2021 and excludes                million shares of common stock reserved for future issuance under the 2021 Plan.

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DILUTION

If you invest in our common stock in this offering, your interest will be diluted to the extent of the difference between the initial public offering price per share of our common stock in this offering and the pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value per share of our common stock immediately after this offering.

As of March 31, 2021, we had a pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value of $                million, or $                per share of common stock. Pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value per share is equal to our total tangible assets, less total liabilities, divided by the number of outstanding shares of our common stock after giving effect to the Corporate Conversion.

After giving effect to the sale of shares of common stock in this offering, after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us, and the application of the net proceeds of this offering to repay $                million of outstanding borrowings under our Credit Agreement as set forth under “Use of Proceeds,” at an assumed initial public offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the price range set forth on the cover of this prospectus, our pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value as of March 31, 2021 would have been $                million, or $                per share of common stock. This represents an immediate increase in pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value of $                per share to our existing shareholders and an immediate dilution in pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value of $                per share to investors participating in this offering at the assumed initial public offering price. The following table illustrates this per share dilution:

A $1.00 increase or decrease in the assumed initial public offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the estimated public offering price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, would increase or decrease our pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value per share after this offering by $                , and would increase or decrease the dilution per share to the investors in this offering by $                , assuming that the number of shares offered by us, as set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, remains the same, and after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us. Similarly, each increase or decrease of one million shares in the number of shares of common stock offered by us would increase or decrease our pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value per share after this offering by $                and would increase or decrease dilution per share to investors in this offering by                 , assuming the assumed initial public offering price, which is the midpoint of the price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, remains the same and after deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

If the underwriters exercise their option to purchase additional shares in full, the pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value per share after this offering would be $                , and the dilution in pro forma as adjusted net tangible book value per share to new investors in this offering would be $                .

The following table presents, on a pro forma as adjusted basis as described above, as of March 31, 2021, after giving effect to (i) the completion of the Corporate Conversion prior to the completion of this offering and (ii) the differences between our existing shareholders and the investors purchasing shares of our common stock in this offering, with respect to the number of shares purchased, the total consideration paid to us, and the average

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price per share paid by our existing shareholders or to be paid to us by investors purchasing shares in this offering at an assumed offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, before deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

A $1.00 increase or in the assumed initial public offering price of $                per share, which is the midpoint of the price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, would increase or decrease the total consideration paid by new investors by $                million and increase or decrease the percent of total consideration paid by new investors by                %, assuming that the number of shares offered by us, as set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, remains the same and before deducting the underwriting discount and estimated offering expenses payable by us.

Except as otherwise indicated, the above discussion and tables assume no exercise of the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares. After giving effect to sales of shares in this offering, assuming the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares is exercised in full, our existing shareholders would own                % and our new investors would own                % of the total number of shares of our common stock outstanding after this offering.

In addition, to the extent we issue any additional stock options or any stock options are exercised, or we issue any other securities or convertible debt in the future, investors participating in this offering may experience further dilution.

Except as otherwise indicated, the above discussion and tables are based on                shares of our common stock outstanding as of March 31, 2021 after giving effect to the Corporate Conversion, and excludes                 million shares of common stock reserved for future issuance under the 2021 Plan.

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SELECTED CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL DATA

The following tables present our selected consolidated financial data. The selected consolidated statements of operations data for the years ended December 31, 2019 and December 31, 2020, the selected consolidated statement of cash flows data for the years ended December 31, 2019 and December 31, 2020 and the selected consolidated balance sheet data as of December 31, 2019 and December 31, 2020 are derived from our audited consolidated financial statements that are included elsewhere in this prospectus. Our historical results are not necessarily indicative of the results that may be expected in the future. You should read the selected historical financial data below in conjunction with the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and the consolidated financial statements and related notes included elsewhere in this prospectus.

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Non-GAAP Financial Measures

We use supplemental measures of our performance, which are derived from our consolidated financial information but which are not presented in our consolidated financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP. Adjusted EBITDA is the primary financial performance measure used by management to evaluate our business and monitor ongoing results of operations. Adjusted EBITDA is defined as earnings (loss) before interest expense, income taxes, depreciation and amortization, including amortization of debt issuance costs and is further adjusted for IPO readiness costs, acquisition related costs, restructuring and integration costs. Adjusted EBITDA margin represents the Adjusted EBITDA for the applicable period divided by the revenue for that period presented in accordance with GAAP.

We use non-GAAP financial measures to supplement financial information presented on a GAAP basis. We believe that excluding certain items from our GAAP results allows management to better understand our consolidated financial performance from period to period and better project our future consolidated financial performance as forecasts are developed at a level of detail different from that used to prepare GAAP-based

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financial measures. Moreover, we believe these non-GAAP financial measures provide our shareholders with useful information to help them evaluate our operating results by facilitating an enhanced understanding of our operating performance and enabling them to make more meaningful period-to-period comparisons. Although we believe these measures are useful to investors and analysts for the same reasons they are useful to management, as discussed below, these measures are not a substitute for, or superior to, U.S. GAAP financial measures or disclosures. Our non-GAAP financial measures may not be comparable to similarly titled measures of other companies. Other companies, including companies in our industry, may calculate non-GAAP financial measures differently than we do, limiting the usefulness of those measures for comparative purposes.

The non-GAAP financial measures are not meant to be considered as indicators of performance in isolation from or as a substitute for net income (loss) prepared in accordance with GAAP, and should be read only in conjunction with financial information presented on a GAAP basis. Reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to its most directly comparable GAAP financial measure, net loss, is presented below. We encourage you to review the reconciliations in conjunction with the presentation of the non-GAAP financial measures for each of the periods presented. In future fiscal periods, we may exclude such items and may incur income and expenses similar to these excluded items.

Reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA

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MANAGEMENT’S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION AND RESULTS OF OPERATIONS

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with the section titled “Selected Consolidated Financial Data” and our consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this prospectus. The following discussion and analysis contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. When reviewing the discussion below, you should keep in mind the substantial risks and uncertainties that could impact our business. In particular, we encourage you to review the risks and uncertainties described in the section titled “Risk Factors” included elsewhere in this prospectus. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements contained in this report or implied by past results and trends. Our fiscal year ends on December 31. Our historical results are not necessarily indicative of the results that may be expected for any period in the future, and our interim results are not necessarily indicative of the results we expect for the full fiscal year or any other period.

Unless we state otherwise or the context otherwise requires, the terms “we,” “us,” “our,” and “Integral Ad Science” refer to “Integral Ad Science Holding Corp.”

Overview

We are a leading digital advertising verification company by revenue. With our cloud-based technology platform and the actionable insights it provides, we deliver independent measurement and verification of digital advertising across all devices, channels, and formats, including desktop, mobile, connected TV (“CTV”), social, display, and video. Our proprietary and Media Rating Council (the “MRC”) accredited Quality Impressions^™ metric is designed to verify that digital ads are served to a real person rather than a bot, viewable on-screen, and appear in a brand-safe and suitable environment in the correct geography.

Without an independent evaluation of digital advertising quality, brands and their agencies previously relied on a wide range of publishers and ad platforms to self-report and measure the effectiveness of campaigns without a global benchmark to understand success. We are an independent, trusted partner for buyers and sellers of digital advertising to increase accountability, transparency, and effectiveness in the market. We help advertisers optimize their ad spend and better measure consumer engagement with campaigns across platforms, while enabling publishers to improve their inventory yield and revenue.

As a leading ad verification partner, we have deep integrations with all the major advertising and technology platforms including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pinterest, Snap, Spotify, The Trade Desk, Twitter, Verizon Media, Xandr, and YouTube. Our platform uses advanced artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning (“ML”) technologies to process over 100 billion daily web transactions on average. With this data, we deliver real-time insights and analytics to our global customers through our easy-to-use IAS Reporting Platform helping brands, agencies, publishers, and platform partners improve media quality and campaign performance.

Our pre-bid and post-bid verification solutions enable advertisers to measure campaign performance and value across viewability, ad fraud prevention, brand safety and suitability, and contextual targeting for ads on desktop, mobile in-app, social, and connected TV platforms. Our pre-bid programmatic solution is directly integrated with DSPs to help optimize return on ad spend (“ROAS”) by directing budget to the best available inventory. Our solutions help hundreds of publishers globally deliver high quality ad inventory that is fraud free, viewable, brand safe and suitable, and geographically targeted. With our Context Control solution, we help publishers classify and package their inventory to showcase quality placements, increase site engagement, drive revenue, and reduce blocking.

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We have an attractive financial profile with a combination of growth and profitability. Our revenue grew from $213.5 million to $240.6 million for the two-year period ending December 31, 2020, representing a year-over-year growth rate of 13%. For the year ended December 31, 2019, we generated a Net Loss of $51.3 million which reduced to $32.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 representing a 37% reduction in losses year-over-year. Our Net Loss margin improved from (24)% to (13)% as a result of our revenue growth combined with our measures to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Our Adjusted EBITDA improved from $38.8 million to $56.4 million which represents a 45% increase year-over-year, and our Adjusted EBITDA margin improved from 18% to 23% for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively. Also, our ability to grow revenue within our existing customer accounts has remained strong. From December 31, 2017 to December 31, 2020, our average revenue per customer for our top 100 customers has grown at a CAGR of 22%.

COVID-19

Since January 2020, an outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has evolved into a worldwide pandemic. The outbreak sparked responses across countries, states and cities worldwide to enforce various measures of social distancing, shelter-in-place orders, and temporary closure of non-essential businesses to reduce further transmission of the virus. As a result of these measures, the U.S. and global markets have seen significant disruption, the extent and duration of which remains highly uncertain. Due to the pandemic, we have temporarily closed our offices globally, including our corporate headquarters, and are operating with substantially all staff working remotely. Management reviews operations on a continuous basis and there have been minimal interruptions in our customer facing operations to date.

We have continued to experience revenue growth year-over-year and the primary impact of the pandemic on our business has been reduced revenue growth in 2020 compared to 2019. The underlying demand for our products has remained stable. The severity, magnitude and duration of the current COVID-19 pandemic is uncertain, rapidly changing, and hard to predict and depends on events beyond our knowledge or control. These and other impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic could have the effect of heightening many of the other risks described in the “Risk Factors” section, such as those relating to our reputation, product sales, results of operations or financial condition. We might not be able to predict or respond to all impacts on a timely basis to prevent near- or long-term adverse impacts to our results. As a result, we cannot at this time predict the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.

To date, we have not experienced a material increase in customers’ cancellations, or requests for more favorable contractual terms, or concessions. In addition, we have not experienced a significant deterioration in

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the collectability of our receivables or a material negative impact from our vendors and third-party service providers. Further, we have not incurred impairment losses in the carrying values of our assets as result of the pandemic and are not aware of any specific events or circumstances that would require a revision to the estimates reflected in our consolidated financial statements.

We have had sufficient liquidity and capital resources to continue to meet our operating needs and our ability to continue to service our debt or other financial obligations is not currently impaired.

Our Business Model

We generate revenue based on the volume of purchased digital ads that our solution measures. Advertisers use our digital marketing solutions for ad viewability, brand safety, optimization, context control, and ad fraud prevention. Advertisers pay us based on the total volume of impressions, which is our primary contracting model. Certain contracts with advertisers have pricing with a minimum commitment and/or fixed fee, plus overage, based on a predetermined number of impressions. We maintain an expansive set of integrations across the digital advertising ecosystem, including with leading programmatic and social platforms, which enables us to cover all key channels, formats and devices. We generate revenue from sell-side customers from contracts that are generally for twelve-month terms (with auto renew), and a fixed fee each month (tied to a total number of impressions), and an overage CPM that is applied when impressions exceed the impression threshold for a particular tier.

Key Factors Affecting Our Performance

Our historical financial performance has been, and we expect our financial performance in the future to be, driven by our ability to:

Innovate and Develop New Products for Key High-Growth Segments

For example, with the introduction of our pre-bid contextual capability in 2020, we not only enhanced our core verification offering, but we were also able to expand into contextual targeting addressing new needs and providing new value to our customers. Similarly, in 2019, our connected TV solution expanded our presence into this important and emerging digital channel.

Increase Sales Within Our Existing Customer Base

We aim to increase the use of our products among existing customers across more campaigns and impressions. Given our comprehensive product portfolio, we believe we can cross-sell additional or new solutions to provide end-to-end coverage to more clients from pre-bid viewability to post-buy verification, fraud prevention, safety, suitability, and targeting.

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Acquire New Customers and Increase Market Share

Our ability to acquire new customers and increase our market share is dependent upon a number of factors, including the effectiveness of our solutions, marketing and sales to drive new business prospects and execution, client digital marketing investment adoption, new products and feature offerings, global reach and the growth of the market for digital ad verification. There is a market opportunity to provide advertisers directly or through advertising agencies with verification services, specifically around ad viewability, ad fraud prevention and brand safety and suitability. Based on a March 2021 analysis by Frost & Sullivan, we estimate the global market opportunity for our ad verification solutions to be $9.5 billion and expect it to grow at a 16.2% CAGR from 2021 to 2025. We plan to work with the top 500 global advertisers by targeting high-spend verticals and brands with a natural sensitivity for brand safety, brand suitability, and ROAS needs. We believe we will increase our market share by strengthening our work with the leading social platforms, enhancing our programmatic solutions, deriving benefit from our broad global position, and leveraging our differentiated data science and market-leading contextual capabilities.

Expand Customer Base Internationally

Our ability to expand our customer base internationally is dependent upon a number of factors, including effectively implementing our business processes and go-to-market strategy, our ability to adapt to market or cultural differences, the general competitive landscape, our ability to invest in our sales and marketing channels, the maturity and growth trajectory of our services by region and our brand awareness and perception. Global marketers are becoming increasingly cognizant of the value of sophisticated verification strategies and, as such, we believe there is growing demand for our services internationally. Our investments in international markets resulted in an 18% growth in revenue year-over-year. We believe that Latin America and the APAC region may represent substantial growth opportunities, and we are investing in developing our business in those markets by way of expanded in-market customer service investment and by leveraging our global relationships. We aim to continue to grow outside the U.S. in Europe and other established markets such as Australia and Japan, and view ourselves as best positioned to continue penetrating these markets given our market-leading global footprint.

Seasonality

We experience fluctuations in revenue that coincide with seasonal fluctuations in the digital ad spending of our customers. The global advertising industry experiences seasonal trends that affect the vast majority of participants in the digital advertising ecosystem. Most notably, advertisers have historically spent relatively more in the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with the holiday shopping season, and relatively less in the first quarter. We expect seasonality trends to continue, and our ability to manage our resources in anticipation of these trends will affect our operating results. Consequently, the fourth quarter usually reflects the highest level of measurement activity and the first quarter reflects the lowest level of activity. Our revenue, cash flow, operating results and other key operating and performance metrics may vary from quarter to quarter due to the seasonal nature of our clients’ spending on advertising campaigns. While our revenue is highly re-occurring, seasonal fluctuations in ad spend may impact quarter-over-quarter results. We believe that the year-over-year comparison of results more appropriately reflects the overall performance of the business. See “Risk Factors- Certain of our operating results and financial metrics may be difficult to predict as a result of seasonality.”

Key Business Metrics

In addition to our GAAP financial information, we review a number of operating and financial metrics, including the following key metrics, to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate business plans and make strategic decisions.

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The following table sets forth our key performance indicators as of and for the year ended December 31, 2019 and 2020:

Net revenue retention

We define net revenue retention as a metric to reflect the expansion or contraction of our customers’ revenue by measuring the period-over-period change in revenues from customers who were also customers in the prior period. As such, this metric includes the impact of any churned, or lost, customers from the prior period as well as any increases or decreases in their spend, including the positive revenue impacts of selling new services to an existing customer. The numerator and denominator includes revenue from all customers that we served and from which we recognized revenue in the earlier of the two periods being compared. We define a “customer” as any account that spends at least $3,000 in the trailing twelve months. We calculate our net revenue retention as follows:

Numerator: The total revenue earned during the current period from the cohort of customers in the prior period.

Denominator: The total revenue earned during the immediately preceding period from such cohort of customers in such period.

The quotient obtained from this calculation is our net revenue retention rate. We have generated strong historical net revenue retention rates, with 112% for the year ended December 31, 2019 and 108% for the year ended December 31, 2020.

Our calculation of Net Revenue Retention may differ from similarly titled metrics presented by other companies.

Total customers

We view the number of customers as a key indicator of our scale and growth and the adoption of our platform. We determine our number of customers by counting the total number of accounts who have spent at least $3,000 in the trailing twelve months. The total number of customers has limitations as an operating metric as it does not reflect the product mix chosen by our customers, the order frequency, or the purchasing behavior of our customers. Because of these and other limitations, we consider, and you should consider, customers in conjunction with our other metrics, including net revenue retention, net loss, Adjusted EBITDA, and average revenue per customer.

Total number of large customers

Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of large customers who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. Increasing awareness of our solutions, further developing our sales and marketing expertise and partner ecosystem, and continuing to build solutions that address the unique identity needs of the top 500 global advertisers have increased our number of large customers. We determine our number of large customers by counting the total number of accounts who have spent at least $200,000 per year. We believe the recruitment and cultivation of large customers is critical to our long-term success.

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Components of Results of Operations

Revenue

We derive revenue primarily from our Verification and Optimization services delivered to our customers across the digital advertising platform. Fees associated with our contracts include impression-based fees driven by impression volume and CPM.

We deliver our products and solutions to two customer types (i) buy-side (advertisers and agencies) and (ii) sell-side (publishers, advertising/audience networks, and supply side platforms). We offer each customer segment a product suite to address their unique needs that consist of (i) Verification solutions and (ii) Optimization solutions. These solutions are provided to these customers through our cloud-based technology platform. We generally generate revenue by charging a CPM based on the volume of purchased digital ads that we measure and optimize on behalf of these customers. There are no separate fees to access our platform. Depending on our customer needs, our contracts have (i) usage-based pricing, or (ii) monthly, quarterly or annual minimum commitments, or (iii) fixed fees. Usage based pricing is our primary contracting model. For these minimum commitment contracts, if a customer uses fewer impressions than the minimum, there are no discounts or prorating to adjust the minimum fees, and if a customer uses more impressions than the minimum, then an overage fee is applied on such usage.

We recognize revenue when control of the promised services is transferred to customers. Revenue from the cloud-based technology platform is primarily recognized based on impressions delivered to customers. An “impression” is delivered when an advertisement appears on pages viewed by users. A significant majority (i.e., over 90%) of the Company’s contracts for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019 are usage-based contracts with no substantive minimum commitments. We have certain contracts for which pricing is variable through tiered pricing arrangements or include annual base fees that do not coincide with the calendar year, requiring an estimate of the transaction price attributable to each year. The majority of our contracts have a duration of one year or less.

Operating Expenses

Cost of revenue. Cost of revenue consists of data center costs, hosting fees, revenue share with our DSP partners and personnel costs. Personnel costs include salaries, bonuses, equity-based compensation, and employee benefit costs, primarily attributable to our customer operations group. Our customer operations group is responsible for onboarding, integration of new clients and providing support for existing customers, including technical support for our technology platform and product offering. We allocate overhead such as rent and occupancy and information technology infrastructure charges based on headcount.

Sales and marketing. Sales and marketing expense consists primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, equity-based compensation, employee benefits costs and commission costs, for our sales and marketing personnel. Sales and marketing expense also includes costs for advertising, promotional and other marketing activities. We allocate overhead such as rent and occupancy and information technology infrastructure charges based on headcount. Sales commissions are expensed as incurred.

Technology and development. Technology and development expense consists primarily of personnel costs of our engineering, product, and data sciences activities. Personnel costs including salaries, bonuses, equity-based compensation and employee benefits costs, third-party consultant costs associated with the ongoing development and maintenance of our technology platform and product offering. We allocate overhead such as rent and occupancy and information technology infrastructure charges based on headcount. Technology and development costs are expensed as incurred, except to the extent that such costs are associated with software development that qualifies for capitalization, which are then recorded as capitalized software development costs included in internal use software, net on our consolidated balance sheet.

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General and administrative. General and administrative expense consist of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, equity-based compensation, and employee benefits costs for our executive, finance, legal, human resources, information technology, and other administrative employees. General and administrative expenses also include outside consulting, legal and accounting services, allocated facilities costs, and travel and entertainment primarily related to intra-office travel and conferences.

Depreciation and amortization. Depreciation and amortization expense consists primarily of depreciation and amortization expenses related to customer relationships, developed technologies, trademarks, favorable leases, equipment, leasehold improvements and other tangible and intangible assets. We depreciate and amortize our assets in accordance with our accounting policies. Maintenance and repairs, which do not extend the useful life of the respective assets, are charged to expense as incurred. Intangible assets are amortized on a straight-line basis over their estimated useful lives or using an accelerated method. Useful lives of intangible assets range from four years to fifteen years.

Interest expense, net

Interest expense, net. Interest expense consists primarily of interest payments on our outstanding borrowings under our Term Loan Facility and amortization of related debt issuance costs net of interest income.

Benefit from income taxes

Benefit from income taxes. The benefit from income taxes resulted primarily from deferred tax benefits resulting from the current period losses in the U.S.

Results of Operations

The following table sets forth our consolidated statement of operations for the period indicated:

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The following table sets forth our consolidated statements of operations and expressed as a percentage of total revenue for the periods indicated:

Results of Operations for the Years Ended December 31, 2019 and 2020

Revenue

Total revenue increased by $27.1 million, or 13%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. Total revenue increased primarily due to an increase in our programmatic revenue of $18.9 million attributable to growth in volume of impressions of 8% and an increase of 18% in average CPMs. Of the 18% increase in average CPMs, half or 9% of that growth was attributable to the launch of our Context Control solution launched in early 2020. Revenue from our advertiser direct customers increased by $8.7 million attributable to growth in volume of impressions of 13% partially offset by a decrease of 5% in average CPMs due to changes in mix from open web towards social platforms. The increases in revenue were partially offset by a decline of $2.2 million in our supply side revenue.

Operating expenses

Cost of revenue. Cost of revenue increased by $7.4 million, or 22%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. The increase was primarily due to a $6.7 million increase in data center and hosting fees resulting from the growth of our business, an increase of $4.0 million in revenue share to our DSP partners on account of significant growth in our programmatic revenue and an increase of $0.4 million in severance related costs. These increases were partially offset by a decrease of $1.8 million in personnel related costs because of workforce reductions in 2020, a decrease of $0.7 million in allocated overhead and a decrease of $1.0 million in software license costs resulting from replacing third party vendors with in-house technologies.

Sales and marketing. Sales and marketing expenses decreased by $5.3 million, or 7%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. The decrease was primarily due to a reduction in travel-related expenses of $2.9 million reflecting travel restrictions resulting from COVID-19, a decrease of $1.3 million in advertising and promotional expenses, a decrease of $1.1 million in personnel costs and a decrease of $0.9 million in allocated overhead. These decreases were partially offset by an increase in

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severance charges of $1.0 million. While reduction in expenses such as travel were directly related to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is unclear if such expenses would be reinstated to pre-Covid-19 levels given the continued uncertainty around travel restrictions and office openings.

Technology and development. Technology and development expenses increased by $8.6 million, or 21%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. The increase was impacted primarily by additional personnel costs of $1.7 million due to increased headcount, an increase in server, hosting and license fees of $2.6 million to support our expanding business and an increase in professional fees of $3.0 million related primarily to migrating from data centers to our hosting platform. In addition, we also incurred $0.6 million in severance costs related to actions taken during the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce costs.

General and administrative. General and administrative expenses increased by $1.2 million, or 4%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. The increase was primarily due to an increase in personnel costs of $1.6 million due to increased headcount and increase in accounting and tax compliance fees of $1.4 million. These increases were partially offset by a decrease in professional fees of $0.7 million and a decrease in the allowance for doubtful accounts of $1.6 million due to improved collection efforts.

Depreciation and amortization. Depreciation and amortization expenses decreased by $4.6 million, or 7%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This decrease was a result of a decreased amortization of our Developed Technology by $8.0 million resulting from the use of the accelerated method to amortize the asset. The decrease was partially offset by increased amortization expense related to our internal-use software of $4.8 million.

Interest expense, net

Interest expense, net. Interest expense decreased by $1.4 million, or 4%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019 primarily on account of lower interest expense related to our Term Loan Facility of $2.0 million, which was partially offset by reduced interest income of $0.4 million and increase in PIK and other fees of $0.2 million.

Benefit from income taxes

Benefit from income taxes. Benefit from income taxes decreased by $2.4 million, or 15%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019 primarily on account of a decrease in losses. We recognized a higher deferred tax benefit for the year ended December 31, 2020 of $4.6 million primarily on account of a decrease in the state and local income tax rate.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

General

As of December 31, 2020, our principal sources of liquidity were cash and cash equivalents totaling $51.7 million, which was held for working capital purposes, as well as the available balance of our Revolving Credit Facility, described further below. Following the completion of this offering, we expect that our operating cash flows, in addition to our cash and cash equivalents, will enable us to continue to make such investments in the future. We expect our operating cash flows to further improve as we increase our operational efficiency and experience economies of scale.

We have financed our operations primarily through debt financing. We believe our existing cash and cash equivalents, our Revolving Credit Facility and cash provided by operations will be sufficient to meet our working capital and capital expenditure needs for at least the next twelve months. Our future capital requirements will depend on many factors including our growth rate, the timing and extent of spending to support development

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efforts, the expansion of sales and marketing activities, the introduction of new and enhanced products and services offerings, the continuing market acceptance of our products. In the future, we may enter into arrangements to acquire or invest in complementary businesses, services and technologies, including intellectual property rights.

We may be required to seek additional equity or debt financing. In the event that additional financing is required from outside sources, we may not be able to raise it on terms acceptable to us or at all. If we are unable to raise additional capital or generate cash flows necessary to expand our operations and invest in new technologies, it could reduce our ability to compete successfully and harm our results of operations.

Some of our customers pay in advance for subscriptions, a portion of which is recorded as deferred revenue. Deferred revenue consists of the unearned portion of billed fees for our subscriptions, which is later recognized as revenue in accordance with our revenue recognition policy. As of December 31, 2020, we had deferred revenue of $1.41 million, all of which was recorded as a current liability and is expected to be recorded as revenue in the next twelve months, provided all other revenue recognition criteria have been met.

Credit Facilities

On July 19, 2018, we entered into a Credit Agreement with a syndicate of lenders, comprised of the $325.0 million Term Loan Facility and the $25.0 million Revolving Credit Facility, with a maturity date of July 19, 2024 and a maturity date of July 19, 2023, respectively. Pursuant to the Incremental Facility Assumption Agreement No. 1, dated as of November 19, 2019 (the “Credit Agreement Amendment”), the Term Loan Facility was increased to $345.0 million. As of December 31, 2020, we had $345.0 million outstanding under our Term Loan Facility.

The Credit Agreement includes Paid in Kind (“PIK”) interest which bears an interest rate of 1.25% per annum. All PIK interest due is paid by capitalizing such interest and adding such applicable PIK interest to the principal amount of the outstanding Term Loan Facility. Borrowings under the Credit Agreement bear interest at a rate per annum, at our option, equal to an applicable margin, plus, (a) for alternate base rate borrowings, the highest of (i) the rate last quoted by The Wall Street Journal as the “prime rate” in the United States, (ii) the Federal Funds Rate in effect on such day plus 1/2 of 1.00% and (iii) the Adjusted LIBOR for a one month interest period on such day plus 1.00% and (b) for eurodollar borrowings, the Adjusted LIBOR determined by the greater of (i) the LIBOR for the relevant interest period divided by 1 minus the statutory reserves (if any) and (ii) 1.00%.

The applicable margin for borrowings under the Credit Agreement is (a) for alternate base rate borrowings, (i) 5.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is greater than 6.50 to 1.00, (ii) 4.50% so long as the total leverage ratio is less than or equal to 6.50 to 1.00 and greater than 5.75 to 1.00 or (iii) 4.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is less or equal to 5.75 to 1.00 and (b) for eurodollar borrowings, (i) 6.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is greater than 6.50 to 1.00, (ii) 5.50% so long as the total leverage ratio is less than or equal to 6.50 to 1.00 and greater than 5.75 to 1.00 or (iii) 5.00% so long as the total leverage ratio is less or equal to 5.75 to 1.00. The total leverage ratio is determined in accordance with the terms of the Credit Agreement.

The interest rate on the Term Loan Facility was 7.00% per annum as of December 31, 2020. The Term Loan Facility does not require periodic principal payments.

As of December 31, 2020, the Company had no amounts outstanding on the Revolving Credit Facility. We are required to pay a commitment fee on the average daily undrawn portion of the Revolving Credit Facility of 0.375%-0.50% per annum (varying based on the leverage ratio tiers applicable to the applicable margin as described above), a letter of credit fronting fee of 0.125% per annum and a letter of credit participation fee equal to the applicable margin for eurodollar revolving loans on the actual daily amount of the letter of credit exposure.

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The Credit Agreement contains customary representations and warranties, affirmative covenants, reporting obligations, negative covenants and events of default. See “Description of Certain Indebtedness—Senior Secured Credit Agreement.”

Cash Flows

The following table presents a summary of our consolidated cash flows from operating, investing and financing activities for the year ended December 31, 2019 and 2020.

Operating Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2019, net cash used in operating activities was $1.9 million, resulting from a net loss of $51.3 million partially offset by adjustments for non-cash expenses of depreciation and amortization of $70.3 million, a deferred tax benefit of $16.9 million, a reduction in working capital balances of $13.6 million offset by other non-cash adjustments of $9.6 million.

For the year ended December 31, 2020, net cash provided by operating activities was $33.9 million, resulting from a net loss of $32.4 million partially offset by adjustments for non-cash expenses of depreciation and amortization of $65.7 million, a deferred tax benefit of $14.6 million, cash provided by changes in working capital of $7.9 million and other non-cash adjustments of $8.0 million.

Investing Activities

Cash used in investing activities was $25.0 million during the year ended December 31, 2019, reflecting our acquisition of ADmantX S.p.A. for $17.6 million, capitalized costs relating to internal use software of $6.4 million and purchase of property and equipment of $1.0 million.

Cash used in investing activities was $9.7 million during the year ended December 31, 2020, reflecting capitalized costs relating to our internal use software of $9.0 million and purchase of property and equipment of $0.6 million.

Financing Activities

Cash provided by financing activities was $13.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2019 consisting primarily of proceeds from issuance of debt of $20.0 million which was partially offset by payments for unit repurchases of $3.2 million and payments on capital lease obligations of $2.7 million.

Cash provided by financing activities was $1.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 consisting primarily of payments on capital lease obligations of $1.5 million and unit repurchases of $0.2 million.

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Contractual Obligations and Commitments

Our principal commitments consist of obligations under operating leases for office space, our purchase commitments related to hosting and data services and repayments of long-term debt. We lease office space under operating leases, which expire on various dates through May 2026 and the total noncancellable payments under these leases were $27.0 million as of December 31, 2020. Total noncancelable purchase commitments related to hosting services as of December 31, 2020 were $70,000 for periods through 2024. The Term Loan Facility of $345.0 million matures in 2024.

Impact of Inflation

While inflation may impact our revenues and costs of revenues, we believe the effects of inflation, if any, on our results of operations and financial condition have not been significant. However, there can be no assurance that our results of operations and financial condition will not be materially impacted by inflation in the future.

Indemnification Agreements

In the ordinary course of business, we enter into agreements of varying scope and terms pursuant to which we agree to indemnify customers, including, but not limited to, losses arising out of the breach of such agreements, services to be provided by us or from intellectual property infringement claims made by third parties. In addition, in connection with the completion of this offering we intend to enter into indemnification agreements with our directors and certain officers and employees that will require us, among other things, to indemnify them against certain liabilities that may arise by reason of their status or service as directors, officers or employees. No demands have been made upon us to provide indemnification under such agreements and there are no claims that we are aware of that could have a material effect on our consolidated balance sheets, consolidated statements of operations and comprehensive loss, or consolidated statements of cash flows.

Off-Balance Sheet Arrangements

We had no off-balance sheet arrangements as of December 31, 2020.

JOBS Act

We qualify as an “emerging growth company” pursuant to the provisions of the JOBS Act. For as long as we are an “emerging growth company,” we may take advantage of certain exemptions from various reporting requirements that are applicable to other public companies that are not “emerging growth companies,” including, but not limited to, not being required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements, exemptions from the requirements of holding advisory “say-on-pay” votes on executive compensation and shareholder advisory votes on golden parachute compensation.

The JOBS Act also permits an emerging growth company like us to take advantage of an extended transition period to comply with new or revised accounting standards applicable to public companies. We have elected to “opt-in” to this extended transition period for complying with new or revised accounting standards and, therefore, we will not be subject to the same new or revised accounting standards as other public companies that comply with such new or revised accounting standards on a non-delayed basis.

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

The discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations are based upon our consolidated financial statements, which have been prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The preparation of these financial statements requires management to make estimates and judgments that affect the reported

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amounts of assets and liabilities, revenue and expenses and related disclosures of contingent assets and liabilities at the date of our financial statements. Actual results may differ from these estimates under different assumptions or conditions, impacting our reported results of operations and financial condition.

Certain accounting policies involve significant judgments and assumptions by management, which have a material impact on the carrying value of assets and liabilities and the recognition of income and expenses. Management considers these accounting policies to be critical accounting policies. The estimates and assumptions used by management are based on historical experience and other factors, which are believed to be reasonable under the circumstances. The significant accounting policies which we believe are the most critical to aid in fully understanding and evaluating our reported financial results are described below. Refer to “Note 2 — Summary of Significant Accounting Policies” to the consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this prospectus for more detailed information regarding our critical accounting policies.

Revenue Recognition

We adopted the new revenue recognition standard Accounting Standards Codification (ASC 606) effective January 1, 2019 using the modified retrospective method for all contracts not completed as of the date of adoption. The core principle of ASC 606 is to recognize revenue when control of promised goods or services is transferred to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration that is expected to be received for those goods and services. Based on the terms of our contracts with customers and consistent with prior practice, we recognize revenue upon invoicing for a large majority of our contracts. Additionally, the performance obligations identified are consistent with prior years. As such, the adoption did not have a material impact on our financial statements. Refer to Recently Issued Accounting Standards in Note 2 for additional information regarding our revenue recognition policies under the new standard and the impact on our financial position and results of operations as of and for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020.

We derive revenue primarily from advertisers and programmatic services offered through a demand side platform delivered to customers across the digital advertising platform, which is our performance obligation. Fees associated with our contracts include impression-based fees driven by impression volume and CPM. The solutions are designed to serve both the buy-side and the sell-side of digital ad transactions.

The adoption of ASC 606 in 2019 led us to evaluate all contracts not completed as of January 1, 2019. Part of that assessment is to calculate the cumulative effect of adopting the new revenue recognition standard. A majority of our contracts are usage based or have commitments that refresh quarterly and monthly. We have a small population of contracts for which pricing is variable through tiered pricing arrangements, or include annual base fees that do not coincide with the calendar year, requiring an estimate of the transaction price attributable to each year. We calculated the transaction price related to these contracts to determine the cumulative effect of adoption as of January 1, 2019, and recorded the adjustment, net of tax, to retained earnings and deferred revenue.

We evaluate arrangements with our customers where the customer purchases our services through a demand side platform to determine if such revenue should be reported on a gross or net basis. In these arrangements, the demand side platform collects the fee on our behalf for the purchase of advertising inventory on an exchange. We are primarily responsible for providing these services directly to the customer and have latitude in establishing the sales price with the customers. As a result, we record revenue for the gross amounts paid by the customers for these services and records the amounts retained by the demand side platforms as a cost of revenue.

Impairment of Goodwill, Intangible Assets and Long-Lived Assets

We record goodwill as the excess of purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and identifiable intangible assets acquired. We evaluate goodwill, at a minimum, on an annual basis in the fourth quarter, and

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whenever events or changes in circumstances suggest that the carrying amount may not be recoverable. Impairment of goodwill is tested at the reporting unit level by comparing the reporting unit’s carrying amount, including goodwill, to its fair value. For purposes of this analysis, we consider the Company to be a single reporting unit. We will first perform a qualitative analysis (“Step Zero”) to determine if the existence of events or circumstances would lead to a conclusion that it is more likely than not that the fair value of the reporting unit is less than the carrying value. If after this assessment it is determined that it is more likely than not that the fair value is less than the carrying value, then a quantitative goodwill impairment analysis is performed which is referred to as “Step 1”. Depending upon the results of that measurement, the recorded goodwill may be written down, and impairment expense is recorded in the consolidated statements of operations when the carrying amount of the reporting unit exceeds the fair value of the reporting unit. As of the fourth quarter of 2020, we conducted a Step Zero analysis and concluded that there were no impairment indicators. Goodwill is tested annually for impairment as well as whenever events or circumstances change that would make it more likely than not that an impairment may have occurred. There is inherent subjectivity involved in estimating future cash flows, which can have a material impact on the amount of any potential impairment. Changes in estimates of future cash flows could result in a write-down of the asset in a future period.

Our intangible assets consist of developed technology, customer relationships, favorable leases, and trademarks. Intangible assets are amortized on a straight-line basis or using an accelerated method over their estimated useful lives. Intangible assets are reviewed for impairment whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that the carrying amount of the assets may not be recoverable. The fair value of identifiable intangible assets is based on significant judgments and estimates made by management. Such estimates are based on valuation techniques, which require forecasting of future cash flows and developing other assumptions. These estimates and assumptions are based on historical experience and information obtained from the management of the acquired companies, and also include, but are not limited to, future expected cash flows earned from the product-related technology and discount rates applied in determining the present value of those cash flows. Unanticipated events and circumstances may occur that could affect the accuracy or validity of such assumptions, estimates or actual results.

All long-lived assets are subject to review for impairment whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that the carrying amount of an asset may not be recoverable. Recoverability is assessed based on the future cash flows expected to result from the use of the asset and its eventual disposition. If the sum of the undiscounted cash flows is less than the carrying amount of the asset, an impairment loss is recognized. Any impairment loss, if indicated, is measured as the amount by which the carrying amount of the asset exceeds its estimated fair value and is recognized as a reduction in the carrying amount of the asset.

As of December 31, 2020, there were no events or changes in circumstances to indicate that the carrying amount of the assets may not be recoverable.

Business Combinations

Upon acquisition of a company, we determine if the transaction is a business combination, which is accounted for using the acquisition method of accounting. Under the acquisition method, once control is obtained of a business, the assets acquired, and liabilities assumed, including amounts attributed to noncontrolling interests, are recorded at fair value. We use our best estimate and assumptions to assign fair value to the tangible and intangible assets acquired and liabilities assumed at the acquisition date. One of the most significant estimates relates to the determination of the fair value of these assets and liabilities. The determination of the fair values is based on estimates and judgments made by us. We estimate fair value are based upon assumptions we believe to be reasonable, but which are inherently uncertain and unpredictable. Measurement period adjustments are reflected at the time identified, up through the conclusion of the measurement period, which is the time at which all information for determination of the values of assets acquired and liabilities assumed is received, and is not to exceed one year from the acquisition date. We may record adjustments to the fair value of these tangible and intangible assets acquired and liabilities assumed, with the corresponding offset to goodwill.

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Equity-Based Compensation

Equity-based compensation is measured at the grant date based on the fair value of the award and is recognized as expense over the requisite service period, which is generally the vesting period. We estimate expected forfeitures of stock-based awards at the grant date and recognizes compensation cost only for those awards expected to vest. The forfeiture assumption is ultimately adjusted to the actual forfeiture rate. Therefore, changes in the forfeiture assumptions may affect the timing of the total amount of expense recognized over the vesting period. Estimated forfeitures are reassessed in each reporting period and may change based on new facts and circumstances.

The fair value of each option grant is estimated on the date of grant using the modified Black-Scholes pricing model and Monte Carlo simulation. We estimated its future stock price volatility based upon observed option-implied volatilities for a group of peer companies. Management believes this is the best estimate of the expected volatility over the weighted-average expected term of its option grants. The risk-free interest rate is based on the implied yield currently available on U.S. treasury issues with terms approximately equal to the expected term of the option. We currently have no history or expectation of paying cash dividends on common stock. We use the simplified method to calculate the expected term for its options.

For options that include performance conditions, we recognize the associated expense when the performance is considered to be probable. For option awards that contain market conditions (i.e., achievement of a specified equity return or stock price), we value such awards on the date of grant using a Monte Carlo simulation model.

We also expect to incur additional costs as a result of the successful completion of this offering. We have granted time-based service options under our 2018 Unit Option Plan (the “2018 Plan”). The time-based options vest over four years with 25% vesting after 12 months and an additional 6.25% vesting at the end of each successive quarter thereafter. The 2018 Plan currently includes a repurchase feature, wherein the units can be repurchased by the Company at cost upon resignation of the employee. The time-based service options in Integral Ad Science Holding LLC are expected to be adjusted in connection with this offering to reflect the Company’s conversion to a C-Corp. In addition, it is expected that the repurchase feature would be removed. As a result of this adjustment, a grant date would be established which is expected to be the completion date of this offering and the Company would recognize the grant date fair value of these awards upon the price to the public in this offering. As such, the fair value of the time-based service options (which comprise of 67% of the total options outstanding) will be determined based on the price to the public in this offering. Upon the successful completion of this offering, assuming an initial public offering price of $         per share, which is the midpoint of the estimated price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, we would recognize approximately $         million of compensation expense relating to the time-based service options.

Income Taxes

We are subject to U.S. federal, state, and local income taxation on our income. We account for income taxes using an asset and liability approach, which requires estimates of taxes payable or refunds for the current period and estimates of deferred income tax assets and liabilities for the anticipated future tax consequences attributable to differences between the carrying amounts of assets and liabilities for financial reporting purposes and the corresponding amounts used for income tax purposes. Current and deferred income tax assets and liabilities are based on provisions of the enacted income tax laws and are measured using the enacted income tax rates and laws that are expected to be in effect when the future tax events are expected to reverse. The effects of future changes in income tax laws or rates are not anticipated. The income tax provision is comprised of the current income tax expense and the change in deferred income tax assets and liabilities.

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The portion of any deferred tax asset for which it is more likely than not that a tax benefit will not be realized is offset by recording a valuation allowance. The ultimate realization of deferred tax assets is dependent upon the generation of future taxable income during the periods in which those temporary differences become deductible.

The tax effects of an uncertain tax position (“UTP”) taken or expected to be taken in income tax returns are recognized only if it is “more-likely-than-not” to be sustained on examination by the taxing authorities, based on its technical merits as of the reporting date. The tax benefits recognized in the consolidated financial statements from such a position are measured based on the largest benefit that has a greater than a 50% likelihood of being realized upon ultimate settlement. We recognize estimated interest and penalties related to UTPs in income tax expense.

We recognize the resolution of an UTP in the period when it is effectively settled. Previously recognized tax positions are derecognized in the first period in which it is no longer more likely than not that the tax position would be sustained upon examination.

We evaluated all potential uncertain tax positions and identified no significant uncertain positions.

Unit Valuation

Because our units are not publicly traded, our Board determines the fair value of our units. Their determinations are based, in part, upon valuations provided by third-party valuation firms. Our Board exercises reasonable judgment and considers numerous objective and subjective factors to determine the best estimate of the fair value of our units in accordance with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Practice Guide, Valuation of Privately-Held Company Equity Securities Issued as Compensation, or the AICPA Guide. The factors considered by our Board in estimating the fair value of our units include the following: