Posted March 02, 2020

DURHAM — Serial entrepreneur and Durham native Jud Bowman appears to have the Midas touch.

His first mobile tech startup, Motricity, which stemmed in part from a company he co-founded as a high school senior at the North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics before taking an indefinite leave of absence from Stanford, completed a $50 million IPO co-led by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Motricity came after Bowman cofounded Pinpoint in 1999, and it later merged with Motricity.

Then in 2008, he founded his second, Appia, delivering more than 100 million app installs for hundreds of advertisers, including 60 of the top 100 grossing apps on the App Store and Google Play. Digital Turbine acquired it in March 2015 for approximately $100 million.

Now the 38-year-old is four years into starting Sift Media, which sorts through 50 billion mobile ad requests daily, leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to hyper-target app install ads for clients. And again, it’s also growing like gangbusters.

This week, the Durham-based company raised another $1.5 million for working capital just to keep up. WRAL TechWire’s Chantal Allam recently sat down with him at the startup’s American Underground headquarters to check in. Here’s what he had to say:

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