Quattro veterans launch Adelphic with $2 million and visions of delivering more relevant mobile advertising

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Most people have gotten pretty good at tuning out the ads that intrude on apps and mobile websites, in part because they're not well-matched to what you're doing. (Unlike, say, Google's textual ads that use your search terms to try to intuit what's on your mind.) A new Lexington start-up, Adelphic Mobile, hopes to try to grab your attention — and make mobile ads more valuable for publishers, marketers, and app developers — by delivering more relevant messages.

The company is coming out of stealth mode today with $2 million in funding from Waltham-based Matrix Partners, and a trio of veterans of Quattro Wireless on its team. That company was bought by Apple in 2010, and its product became Apple's iAd system, which delivers ads to many apps distributed through the iTunes Store.

"We're living through the hangover from the first generation of mobile advertising," says Jennifer Lum, Adelphic's co-founder and CEO. "The device is personal, and it's location-aware, but if you look at the click-through rates of mobile advertising and the performance stats, it's not where it needs to be." Lum's co-founder, Changfeng Wang, is also a Quattro veteran, and earlier in his career he worked for Enpocket, a mobile marketing start-up acquired by Nokia, and Engage, an Internet advertising company that was part of the CMGI empire in Andover. "What's missing in the mobile advertising space is so clear," Wang says. "Advertising is about sending the right message to the right audience at the right time, and that's not really happening in mobile." The third Quattro alum at Adelphic is Joe Grabmeier, the company's chief financial officer.

The company hopes to make mobile ad inventory more valuable for publishers and app developers, in part by better understanding the user's recent activity, the device they're using, where they are, and the content they're currently interacting with. "Right now, it's very hard to purchase advertising at scale that let's you reach, say, males carrying an iPhone 4S at 9 a.m. in the morning, in a major metro area," Lum says. Mobile advertising availability — what those in the industry call "inventory" — is growing at "explosive rates," Lum says. "But the agencies and marketers buying that inventory need to be able to do so in a way that makes sense."