Can Nitro's Ad Engine Solve India's Digital Ads 'Blind Spot'?

There’s little point chasing business in a crowd scrolling through Instagram reels on stock tips when a startup’s core consumers — students — are busy looking for late-night snacks or last-minute stationery on Blinkit or Zepto.

That’s the blind spot traditional ad platforms never bridged: they couldn’t reach consumers in the real moments of need. And the reason is simple — most digital ads are still generic, fuelled by unreliable third-party cookies. The result: costs spiral, but consumers remain underserved.

This gap is widening even as India’s advertising market touches INR 1.64 Lakh Cr, with digital commanding 60% of the pie. Accuracy, privacy, and data ownership remain unresolved questions for marketers. That’s where new players like Nitro Ads step in — helping brands tap high-intent audiences beyond Meta & Google, while putting privacy and performance at the centre.

As other channels come with their restrictions, brands advertising on them often end up shooting in the dark, targeting audiences that are too broad, following outdated or inaccurate customer data, and dealing with shallow analytics. The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) shoots up and the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) plummets.

Nitro Ads solves for this by partnering with premium and high-performing ad channels like food delivery apps, payment apps, OTTs and other connected TV (CTV) formats to show ads to a highly curated and potentially engaging audience.

The platform devised a pricing strategy based on performance and outcome. “Brands need to pay only when campaigns deliver measurable results,” said Umair Mohammed, CEO, Nitro Commerce, which lets brands choose to pay as per clicks, sign-ups, or sales, which not only makes the marketing more accountable but also directly impacts the ROI.

“We use real-time intent signals, instead of third-party cookies or static demographics. With transparent, cross-channel analytics, brands can measure ROAS across the entire funnel, discover high-intent audiences in alternative spaces, and drive incremental growth, all while keeping privacy and performance at the core,” the CEO told Inc42.

Umair Mohammed, along with Shamail Tayyab and Pratik Anand, founded Nitro Commerce in 2023 to offer a suite of AI-enabled marketing platforms that directly impact the topline for brands.

Nitro Commerce is a suite of SaaS products that help D2C businesses scale their revenue by enabling intent-based targeting, privacy-first compliance, and cross-channel performance measurement for their ad campaigns. As the umbrella brand, it operates ventures like NitroX, Nitro Ads, Nitro SSO, Nitro Rewards, Nitro Capital, and Nitro Recover.

Nitro built its tech stack on the open internet and includes independent apps, websites and other platforms. This enables brands to own customer data across stages, measure cross-channel campaign performance, reach audiences beyond social and search and gain greater visibility into where ads run and what data powers them.

The martech startup got a whiff of strong business potential in India’s INR 30,000 Cr digital ads market, riding on a surge in CTV or internet-connected TV and retail media consumption.

“With over 6.5 Bn monthly ad impressions, Nitro powers more than 290 publishers and over 500 websites. Our tech delivers 25% faster load times and recovers up to 40% of ad-blocked inventory. It shows how we’re helping publishers unlock real performance and revenue at scale,” Umair said.

Nitro Ads caters to a wide range of brands such as Apple Reseller, Renee, Timex, Blue Tokai, Wonderchef, The Indus Valley, Fiona Diamonds, Lego, Libas, SuperYou, Cosco, Blur India and many more.

The startup also claims to be able to generate over 20 Cr in gross merchandise value (GMV), matched users to 120 Mn shopping user profiles and enabled over 5 Bn in ads impressions on a monthly basis.

No Cookies, Yet Sweet For Marketers

Umair claimed that Nitro Ads has boosted click-through rates by over 50% for brands, meaning that twice as many users now stop and take notice of their ads. At the same time, customer acquisition costs have reduced and ROAS jumped over fivefold.

But the question is, how Nitro is pulling it off.

Nitro Ads skips the cookies completely. Internet cookies aren’t just a threat to the user’s privacy; third-party browser cookies are also limited in their accuracy, not supported by browsers like Safari and Firefox and regulated by privacy regulations like India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA).

Instead, Nitro uses first-party data, which is collected by the brands, device-level signals , consented identifiers and others to fuel Nitro’s high-intent audience identification.

“We use an in-house algorithm (patent-pending) that tracks the intent of the users, presents ads to those who are ready to convert and activates them across payment apps, food delivery apps, OTTs, open internet and other premium channels,” said the CEO.

The engine also runs experiment ads to test different ads and placements in smaller batches. By scanning which versions perform best, it scales those ads into the regions and channels where returns are highest. This saves cost and drives sales.

And all this happens in a way that does not leave the advertiser guessing. A transparent system allows the advertiser to see how the customer data is collected, applied and measured across campaigns. Nitro Ads said that every ad placement and performance metric is traceable so that the brands using the platform can know exactly where their money goes and how it drives results.

A dashboard gives the advertiser a clear, all-in-one view of their campaigns. They can track ROAS, CAC, and Click Through Rate (CTR) in real-time, see how different audience groups are behaving, check consent logs to stay GDPR-compliant, and compare results across platforms to plan budgets more effectively.

A Roadmap Beyond Indian Borders

Digital ad spends in India are expected to average a 15.6% growth rate through the next three years on the back of a booming D2C market that’s likely to reach $300 Bn by 2030, led by a billion-plus internet users.

While Nitro Ads is logged in to this momentum, it looks beyond Indian shores for potential business. “India is a perfect market for us, but our vision was never limited to one market. As the issues of privacy and performance persist across markets, Nitro’s privacy-first, intent-based model could solve the problem for the world. We can help brands everywhere in the world to discover high-intent audiences with complete transparency,” Umair shared.

But, the key focus remains on making the ads more useful, both for the advertiser and the viewer. While Nitro Ads uses both intrusive and non-intrusive ads, what makes it different is the fact that each of the ads on the platform is driven by an intent for a specific audience interested in the product. The platform also avoids bombarding the same user repeatedly and keeps a cap on the frequency.

With these fundamentals in place, the company looks to integrate more premium advertisement properties that can give the brands exposure to a highly engaged audience. More and more premium inventories are being added to the platform, claimed the cofounder.

The company will also focus on adding more predictive modelling and automated optimisation to keep improving ROAS and CAC for brands.

“But as we go ahead, AI seeps into every layer of technology, and digital advertising is being reshaped in real time. We’re working to make ads not just smarter, but also more engaging for viewers, while giving brands a way to boost their revenues,” he said.

It’ll be interesting to watch the evolving dynamics on India’s digital ads front over a clash of IQs, unleashed by Nitro Ads and its ilk, where intelligence is at play on intent.

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