Nature of Operations

12 Months Ended

Dec. 31, 2016

Organization, Consolidation and Presentation of Financial Statements [Abstract]

Nature of Operations

Nature of Operations

Company Overview

The Rubicon Project, Inc., or Rubicon Project or the Company, was formed on April 20, 2007 in Delaware and began operations in April 2007. The Company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

The Company is a technology company with a mission to keep the Internet free and open and to fuel its growth by making it easy and safe to buy and sell advertising. The Company pioneered advertising automation technology to enable the world's leading brands, content creators, and application developers to trade and protect trillions of advertising transactions each month and to improve the advertising experience of consumers. The Company offers a highly scalable platform that provides an automated advertising solution for buyers and sellers of digital advertising.

The Company delivers value to buyers and sellers of digital advertising through the Company’s proprietary advertising automation solution, which provides critical functionality to both buyers and sellers. The advertising automation solution consists of applications for sellers, including providers of websites, mobile applications and other digital media properties, and their representatives, to sell their advertising inventory; applications for buyers, including advertisers, agencies, agency trading desks, demand side platforms, and ad networks, to buy advertising inventory; and a marketplace over which such transactions are executed. This solution incorporates proprietary machine-learning algorithms, sophisticated data processing, high-volume storage, detailed analytics capabilities, and a distributed infrastructure. Together, these features form the basis for the Company’s automated advertising solution that brings buyers and sellers together and facilitates intelligent decision-making and automated transaction execution for the advertising inventory managed on the Company's platform.

Initial Public Offering

In April 2014, the Company completed an initial public offering, or IPO, whereby 6,432,445 shares of common stock were issued and sold by the Company, and 1,354,199 shares of common stock were sold by selling stockholders. Upon the closing of the IPO, all outstanding shares of preferred stock of the Company converted into common stock. See Note 12.

Risks

The Company is subject to certain business risks, including competition, the Company’s ability to adapt its offering in response to market evolution and to maintain market acceptance of its platform solution, the Company’s ability to source demand from buyers of advertising inventory and source supply from sellers of advertising inventory, dependence on growth to achieve its business plan, and pricing pressure, among other things.