Founded by veteran entrepreneurs with specialties in performance and social marketing, Nanigans was formed to help advertisers maximize the effectiveness of Facebook advertising.

An early and initial Facebook Ads API partner, Nanigans drives tens of billions of social ad impressions each month for over 100 large-scale advertisers including Fab.com, Gilt Groupe, Nordstrom’s HauteLook, Wayfair, Joss & Main, Zynga, Kixeye, Kabam, Atari and T-Mobile.

Interested in joining the team behind Nanigans? We’re hiring! Learn more about opportunities here.

Locations

Boston, Massachusetts (Headquarters)

60 State St., 12th Floor, Suite #1225
Boston, MA 02109

Management Team

Ric Calvillo

Ric Calvillo is Nanigans’ co-founder and CEO. Ric has over 20 years of startup experience, having founded and led three technology companies. Prior to co-founding Nanigans, Ric was Founder & CEO of Incipient, Inc., a venture-backed data storage infrastructure software company.

Prior to Incipient, Ric founded and led Conley Corporation, which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 1998. Conley Corp. developed enterprise data storage software including the award-winning EMC PowerPath. Ric spent three years at EMC Corporation as General Manager of the EMC Cambridge Software Center. Ric holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Claude Denton

Claude Denton is Nanigans’ co-founder and CTO. Prior to Nanigans, Claude was Co-Founder and CTO of CourseAdvisor, a data-driven, online lead generator serving the education industry. CourseAdvisor was acquired by The Washington Post Company in 2008 and was subsequently renamed Avenue100. Claude continued as CTO of Avenue100 until joining Nanigans in 2010.

Previously, Claude led product development for Network Elements, a provider of access network solutions for optical networks. At Network Elements, Claude was responsible for several industry firsts, including the first 10 Gb/s multi-protocol IC and module and the first fully integrated single-mode optical transceiver for 10 Gb/s. Prior to Network Elements, Claude developed pioneering high-definition video subsystems for Intergraph Corporation.

Claude holds 13 patents and four applications in the areas of communications and video processing architecture. Claude has BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

Marc Grabowski

Marc Grabowski is Nanigans’ COO. Marc joined Nanigans after a nine-year online advertising career at Yahoo!. Most recently at Yahoo! he was VP Media Sales, North America, where he was responsible for a team of over two-hundred online advertising sales and account management professionals and close to $1 billion of annualized revenue.

At Yahoo! Marc was responsible for driving the Interclick acquisition and leading Genome sales, mid-market sales and the company’s reseller relationships. Other notable achievements during his career at Yahoo! include starting the Local Sales Organization and the Direct Response Sales Organization as well as acting as a liaison during and integration after the Blue Lithium and Right Media acquisitions. Marc holds a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University.

Dr. David C. Parkes

David C. Parkes is a global authority on computational economics and Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and Technical Advisor at Nanigans.

Dr. Parkes works with Nanigans’ engineering team on continued development of its automated bidding algorithms for the Facebook advertising marketplace. These proprietary algorithms are core features of the Nanigans Ad Engine. Leveraging statistics and machine learning, Dr. Parkes also focuses his time at Nanigans on analyzing the cost and value of Facebook audience segments as it relates to advertising.

At Harvard, Dr. Parkes founded the Economics and Computer Science research group, and teaches classes in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and topics at the intersection between computer science and economics. Dr. Parkes serves as Editor of Games and Economic Behavior, the Chair of the ACM SIG on Electronic commerce, and on the boards of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, and the INFORMS Journal of Computing. Previously, Dr. Parkes served on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Dr. Parkes received his Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and an M.Eng. (first class) in Engineering and Computing Science from Oxford University in 1995. He is currently on sabbatical to revise a book on economics and computation.

Dr. Edoardo M. Airoldi

Edoardo M. Airoldi is Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, Founder and Director of the Harvard Laboratory for Applied Statistical Methodology, and Technical Advisor at Nanigans.

Dr. Airoldi’s expertise centers on statistical and machine learning methodology with application to social media analytics and marketing and complex social, communication and information networks. He focuses his time at Nanigans on developing statistical models to increase Facebook user response and engagement and further develop the company’s artificial intelligence algorithms.

Dr. Airoldi’s academic research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, AT&T and Google. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Big Think Delphi Fellowship, and has received several outstanding paper awards, including the John Van Ryzinaward from the International Biometrics Society.

Prior to Harvard, Dr. Airoldi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. He received hisPh.D. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computational and Statistical Learning and in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.Sc. in Mathematical Statistics from Bocconi University. Prior to his advanced degrees, Dr. Airoldi was a Consultant at Bain & Company and Analyst at J.P. Morgan.

An author and frequent speaker on statistical network analysis, Dr. Airoldi most recently spoke at Stanford University on Algorithms for Modern Massive Data Sets and is currently working on a book on the statistical foundations of social network analytics.

Avalon Ventures

Nanigans is venture-backed by Avalon Ventures, a San Diego, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts based venture capital firm focusing on seed and early stage companies in life sciences and information technology. Its managing directors are former entrepreneurs driven by passionate people pursuing disruptive ideas in ever-changing market environments.

Rich Levandov

Avalon Ventures’ Managing Director Rich Levandov, early lead investor in social gaming company Zynga and behavioral ad targeting company Tacoda (sold to AOL in 2007), sits on Nanigans’ Board. Rich has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, operator, angel investor and venture capitalist involving a variety of cutting-edge, high growth, early-stage technology companies. It was after he co-founded Phoenix Technologies (PTEC), a company that helped launch the PC revolution, and served as an early Vice President at America Online, Inc. that he started his venture capital career.