Congratulations to the good people over at open source ad serving venture Openads, which has bagged $15.5m (£7.9m) in a Series B funding round led by Accel Partners.
The cash, which the firm says will be used to boost its product development and headcount, was also provided by existing investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
It follows a $5m first round of financing back in the summer.
Openads, originally created out of sales house Unanimis, says it has around 100,000 websites using its free sell-side ad serving software to manage and monitor campaigns.
Behavioural targeting providers are increasingly using its network of publishers to gather visitor data. It is also hoping to boost its user community further through the launch of a hosted service this quarter (the beta is set to go live today).
According to co-founder Scott Switzer, the funding will see it starting to focus more on monetisating its base of users this year:
"At the moment, we are focused on product development and making sure our publishers have the tools they need to be successful.
"We have held back on commercialisation, but once we have built up a huge number of publishers then we can start providing some more commercial services that continue to be valuable to them."
In a statement, Andrew Braccia of Accel Partners added:
“The rapid growth of the global online advertising market requires the adoption of next generation infrastructure and services for publishers and advertisers alike.
"Openads’ open source heritage and deep global publisher footprint make it uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in the evolution of the digital media landscape”.
Meanwhile, Index Ventures has announced it has led a €7m (£5.3m) round of Series B funding for Criteo, a provider of recommendation technology to etailers.
The money, Index said, would be used by Criteo to expand into new markets, including the UK.
Related research:
Online Ad Serving Buyer’s Guide 2008
Related posts:
Openads nets $5m in VC funding
Interview: Openads co-founder Scott Switzer
Ten digital trends to watch out for in 2008
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2:16PM on 16th January 2008
Thank you for the announcement Richard!
I just want to take the opportunity to let all of you know that some of this money will be used to hire brilliant people. Please take a look at our site and you will find the roles we are currently recruiting for (www.openads.org)
If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me directly
Thanks
Sarah McQuade
Recruitment Manager
1:10PM on 23rd January 2008
Sarah,
Maybe you can hire someone to finally add the billing features that the community has been literally begging for? :-(
Feature Requests Poll - ignored
http://forum.openads.org/index.php?showtopic=6900
Pledgebank offer totally - ignored
http://forum.openads.org/index.php?showtopic=503413057
Lone coders have done it
http://forum.openads.org/index.php?showtopic=12272
Loads more examples throughout the history of this project.
Maybe Google is paying someone NOT to add this feature into OpenAds??
Amazing when you think of it - ad server created to generate revenue, but with no billing or payment processing ... Duh!?