Resilience, Risk-taking and Respect: The 20 Year Partnership at the Heart of iion

This year marks a significant anniversary for the iion team. It has been twenty years since two of our co-founders, Wout and Sanjaya, first began working together. That is two decades of shared history - of joint success, new businesses, personal highs and lows, and enough lessons and mistakes to fill a Netflix series.

As we reflect on this milestone, we are taking the opportunity to look back on their story which culminated in the birth of iion, and to cast our thoughts ahead to what the future holds. 

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An unlikely beginning

Back in 2005, Wout was the Sydney-based owner of a direct-to-consumer mobile content company called Funbox, but he harboured ambitions to move from traditional media channels into online advertising. Realising he “had no clue how to do that”, however, he set out to find someone who did. 

His choice was not the typical candidate. Sri Lankan-born Sanjaya was a qualified doctor who also held an Australian IT and finance degree, but having already earned his stripes in the wild west of online marketing, something clicked, and the two quickly became business partners.

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Early (ad)ventures 

Within a year of partnership, traditional advertising channels had become a distant memory. They dove headfirst into everything digital: affiliate marketing, paid search, email and social. By 2008 they had stumbled upon the ad exchange space, and joined Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange (RMX). This was one of the first programmatic exchanges, long before the term programmatic media existed. 

It was a niche space that few had mastered back in 2007 and according to Sanjaya, they were “building possibly Australia's first ad network to truly leverage programmatic.”. In hindsight, RMX laid important foundations for today’s $600 billion programmatic industry, so it was great they were part of it all in those early days.

In July 2010, the partners launched independent trading desk, Sparcmedia, followed soon after by AdSparc - a company created to help publishers monetise programmatic ad inventory at a time when the "waterfall" was still king. These early programmatic triumphs led to an early exit when an Australian research company acquired and listed the combined businesses on the ASX in 2015. As Wout explains: “I will not forget the proud moment of ringing the bell. It was certainly a highlight in our 20 years of working together.”

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Overcoming bumps in the road to find a new direction 

Despite the euphoria, the listing wasn’t the success they had envisioned. As Sanjaya says, “entrepreneurship isn’t all champagne and high-fives”. Arguably, though, the outcome delivered more than they could have imagined, when the opportunity arose to buy back Adsparc in 2019, with that company becoming the foundation for iion as it is today.

With the re-acquisition, Giuseppe Martoriello joined as a third co-founder. Wout and Sanjaya had been working with Giuseppe since 2014 and knew he was the right person to complement the founder team as they built up the company again from scratch. At a time when gaming was relatively uncharted territory by the big names in advertising, it emerged as a new direction for the iion founding team, who recognised both the challenges and enormous potential it held for brand advertisers.  

They went on to build a first-of-its-kind, full-stack, global game advertising platform for brands. Marrying the expertise and lessons learnt in their first decade together, this combined experience in both the supply and demand side - and optimising the path between the two is a key component of iion’s offering today.

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A winning formula for gaming advertising

When asked to articulate the secret to their long-term success, Wout and Sanjaya are entirely aligned. 

1. Strong, long-standing relationships between co-founders as well as the core team, many of whom have been working together for over a decade. This brings consistent leadership and friendships that go past just business, thriving across geographies and in a global remote-working environment. 
2. Resilience: Not only when celebrating success, but also sticking together when things are tough. As Sanjaya puts it, “It's about showing up, day after day, especially when the storms hit. And trust me, Wout and I have weathered more than a few!”. 

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That longevity and commitment provides the stability the team needs to evolve and adapt to ongoing industry challenges. The world is changing - the next five years will be transformational in adtech and beyond. As we navigate the advent of agentic AI, the foundation they have built makes iion well-positioned to ride that wave - and thrive. And they can’t wait to be part of the massive transition that lays ahead.

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