Video ad services provider BrightRoll, which currently manages about one out of every three U.S. video ads served, has closed a $30 million Series C financing round.
The infusion of cash will be used to continue supporting the company's growth, CEO Tod Sacerdoti told FierceOnlineVideo.
"We're going to use it to do more of the same, to basically focus on four areas," said Sacerdoti. "We'll continue too build our legacy ad network business that we launched in 2006, and we'll begin to focus more on the three emerging areas of growth we've identified." Specifically, we will be expanding internationally, on the mobile ad front and on the continued development of BrightRoll's video ad exchange, all three of which have shown more aggressive growth than the ad network, he said.
BrightRoll's payroll will continue to expand, adding salespeople and engineers. The company has grown from 30 employees in January 2010 to 150 today. That growth, he said, isn't coming from video ad growth on online video centric sites, but from growth on an array of other segments.
"In the past 12 to 24 months, we've really seen an emergence of non-traditional video companies like Pandora and Zynga using video advertising on their sites," Sacerdoti said. "There are a slew of new companies that don't use video content that are growing with the help of video advertising."
BrightRoll is banking on two mega trends to continue its growth, Sacerdoti said. The first, he said, is the sheer amount of dollars going to online video advertising from other categories.
"We're not seeing it come from TV," he said. "What we see is that its coming from print, from outdoor, from more static mediums. That wasn't happening two years ago."
And, Sacerdoti said, ad dollars are quickly moving to aggregators and away from single spots, like individual publishers. According to eMarketer, demand for video advertising is projected to rise 54 percent in 2012; in some cases the demand is outstripping supply.
"These are champagne problems," he said, adding that the rapid growth has produced a doubling in revenue year-over-year at BrightRoll.
The financing round was lead by new investor Trident Capital; Senior Managing Director Evangelos Simoudis will be joining the BrightRoll board. Existing investors True Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Adams Street Partners all participated, as did Comerica Bank.
BrightRoll currently manages 2.25 billion video ads per month, according to data from comScore and BrightRoll's internal reporting. Furthermore, the company now reaches more unique viewers than Hulu, ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC combined.
For more:
- see this release
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