Openads Secures $5 Million Series A Financing from Leading European Venture Capitalists
Index Ventures and Mangrove Capital Fund First Free Adserver
London (PRWEB) June 13, 2007 - Openads, the developer of a free, open source adserver designed for and used by publishers worldwide, secured a $5 million Series A financing led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The London-based company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team.
Founded originally as a technology division within Unanimis, the UK's leading digital advertising business, Openads is now incorporated as a standalone business. Investors Bernard Dalle and Saul Klein from Index Ventures, and Gerard Lopez from Mangrove Capital will join Damon Reeve from Unanimis on the Openads board of directors.
Openads allows publishers to have complete control of their advertising campaigns, offering sophisticated targeting, inventory optimization, rich media and inventory forecasting from a simple yet powerful interface. Openads also allows for integration with more than 30 leading ad networks worldwide. Embraced by more than 20,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, Openads powers more publishers than all competing solutions combined.
"Publishers are feeling pinched and need to improve their effective CPMs and we are providing a publisher based solution that is free, flexible and easy to use." said Scott Switzer, Openads founder and community leader. "We are delighted that experienced firms such as Index and Mangrove decided to join us as partners, supporters and advisors as they have paved the road for successful ventures such as Skype, Spotrunner and MySQL."
Popular Web sites such as Federated Media, Stardoll, and Sun are among those relying on Openads' servers. "Open source has made an impact in market after market. How could we expect advertising to be otherwise," adds Tim O'Reilly, publisher and Openads user. "Openads has quietly become a major player in the Web 2.0 ad scene via its open source adserver."
"Openads' success can be linked to the input and contribution of its users, a hallmark for widely-adopted open source projects, and that large, vibrant and global community is committed to guiding and supporting future releases," said Bernard Dalle, general partner, Index Ventures. "For the ad industry, Openads is disrupting the market with a product that is so easy to use and a great alternative for publishers, regardless of size, sophistication, geography or language. No wonder they have secured more publishers than any other solution on the market today."
About Openads
Openads offers the first free open source adserver product for publishers. The highly sophisticated and Openads adserver software gives site owners everything they need to generate revenue from their websites. Publishers get complete control of banners and campaigns along with a highly sophisticated tracking system for gathering statistics, all from the one simple screen interface. Openads was originally founded as a technology division of Unanimis, the leading UK digital advertising business, and incorporated as a stand alone company in June, 2007. The company is based in London and more information can be found on www.openads.com.
About Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a leading European venture capital firm active in technology venture investing since 1996. The firm is dedicated to helping top entrepreneurial teams in the Information Technology and Life Science sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders. The firm has offices in Geneva, London and Jersey and focuses its investment activity primarily on Europe and Israel. Investments include Skype (the pioneering communications company acquired by eBay); MySQL (the world's most popular open source database); Zend (the company behind the PHP development language); Pentaho (the leader in open source business intelligence); Trolltech (provider of leading software for cross-platform application development on the desktop and for embedded Linux environments). For more information, please visit http://www.indexventures.com.
About Mangrove Capital Partners
Based in Luxembourg, Mangrove Capital Partners is committed to turning entrepreneurial visions into realities as a means to drive capital appreciation for investors. Mangrove's hands-on philosophy in all areas of business and technological development is the cornerstone of the company's investment strategy. The firm invests across Europe and was one of the early investors in Skype.
About Unanimis
Based in London, Unanimis is the UK's leading digital advertising business. Unanimis offers internet advertisers the opportunity to maximise their return from advertising and web publishers a completely outsourced solution to delivering significant advertising revenue. Unanimis has been awarded the Number One UK Ad network 2007, NMA Marketing Services Guide, May 2007; and Top Ten listing in Real Business 'Hot 100' Fastest Growing UK Private Companies, Real Business, April, 2007. Further information about Unanimis is available at http://www.unanimis.co.uk.
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