Stic Raises $10 Million to Put OOH Advertising in the Driver’s Seat

Stic, the startup that pays gig drivers to turn their cars into mobile billboards, has raised $10 million in a bridge round led by Accretion Capital and entrepreneurs including Phil Hellmuth, Adam Waheed, and Chris Detert. The funding brings Stic’s valuation to $200 million and will fuel expansion across 30 U.S. states and Canada over the next year. Founded in 2023, Stic lets drivers download the app for free, upload a photo of their car and license, and receive a branded “smart sticker” that activates once applied. Drivers earn 14 cents per mile for every mile driven, with extra bonuses for high-mileage activity, the company's 22-year-old founder and CEO, Adam Cohen, told ADWEEK. Most drivers work for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon, and other gig platforms, giving brands access to routes and demographics that static billboards rarely reach. For brands, Stic functions like a more flexible billboard buy to drive awareness campaigns. Stic relies on machine-learning capabilities that combines first- and third-party data to help marketers target neighborhoods, commute corridors, and demographic clusters, Cohen added. That data includes a combination of drivers' mobile phone data and first-party data from Stic's smart stickers—for insights for brand partners and campaign visibility—as well as third-party targeting data, according to Cohen. He claims Stic gives brands “unmatched visibility because [brands] are being driven into in completely different areas that they would have never been able to go to if they were just a static billboard." The startup is working with seven brands, including Glow Beverage (where Kylie Jenner is brand ambassador), Whims, and protein-bar company Legendary Foods. Out-of-home, or OOH, advertising is evolving, where brands are increasingly relying on mobile billboards over static ones to gather more eyeballs and impressions. With the U.S. OOH market estimated at $9 billion to $10 billion, startups that combine real-world reach with data-driven targeting are poised to disrupt a long-fragmented industry. Detert, one of the round's investors and the cofounder of Influential (acquired by Publicis), said Stic allows smaller advertisers to appear in marquee locations—like Times Square—at a fraction of the cost of a traditional billboard. Stic makes revenue on a per-campaign basis from brands and said it plans to use the new funding to grow the driver network, enhance its technology, and expand national campaigns to new markets. The round drew advisory support from industry and tech experts, including Lucy Guo, Maurice Maschmeyer, Tanya Cohen, Collins Key, Devan Key, Kamo Jurn, and the Global Wealth Solutions Group of Raymond James. Stic said it plans to raise a Series A funding round soon. A moment that stuck In November 2023, The Wall Street Journal ran a story with the cheeky headline “Advertising Is Dead. Long Live Advertising.” Ironically, that line is what pushed Cohen—then a 20-year-old UCLA student killing time in the Equinox sauna—to start an ad company of his own. Cohen told ADWEEK he'd wandered into the sauna holding a copy of the Journal someone left behind, mostly because he realized people would talk to him if he looked like he knew something about the markets. A venture capitalist took the bait, struck up a conversation, and over lunch the next day walked Cohen through the mechanics of the gig economy. When Cohen finally sat down and actually read the paper, the headline jumped out at him: Advertising is dead. And right beside the article was an ad. Minutes later, he got into an Uber driven by a woman whose car was covered in homemade magnetic ads for her side business—another reminder the obituary wasn’t exactly accurate. The contradiction clicked. That moment, Cohen told ADWEEK, became the genesis of Stic. Driving precision Cohen pitches Stic as a way for brands to buy OOH the way they already buy billboards—only with far more precision. “If a brand tells us they want to reach the Latino community in Los Angeles, we can pinpoint the pockets where that audience actually is,” he said, adding that Stic has a trove of first- and third-party data that help map where certain demographics live, commute, and spend time. That targeting allows brands to specify exactly who they want to reach—25-year-olds of a certain ethnicity, fans of a particular category, or workers with consistent driving patterns, Cohen suggests—and Stic matches them to drivers whose routes naturally intersect with that audience. “The meat and potatoes of the company is the data,” Cohen said. Since launch, Stic’s driver network has grown 600%, with “tens of thousands” of drivers on the waitlist in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, San Francisco, and other markets. Cohen declined to share additional details.

Fundraising

Stic Raises $10 Million to Put OOH Advertising in the Driver’s Seat

The 22-year-old founder is turning gig drivers into mobile billboards, giving them extra income while offering brands a smarter, more flexible way to advertise

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Trishla Ostwal

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