A group of investors has added $20 million to the coffers of TubeMogul, giving the six-year-old company more financial resources to attack a marketing plan to help advertisers buy video space through real-time auctions. The latest investment nearly doubled the total amount of money the company has raised, pushing that to $35 million.
The investment was led by Northgate Capital and existing investors Trinity Ventures and Foundational Capital. The funds will be spent on hiring engineering, sales and marketing staff and expanding into more international markets, a story in Advertising Age said.
TubeMogul's software gives advertisers the ability to buy video ad space for individual campaigns through real-time auctions from multiple ad exchanges and individual publishers. The company's CEO, Brett Wilson, told the magazine the goal is to make big brand advertisers comfortable with using automated features to buy ad space from exchanges. Everyone, according to most reports, is becoming very comfortable placing advertising in online videos.
"We feel there's a market void at the intersection of programmatic and brand advertising that we can own," Wilson said, pointing to a TubeMogul survey product that gives advertisers viewer feedback while the ad campaign is still live.
TubeMogul buys ad space for its customers from open exchanges like Adap.tv, SpotXChange, BrightRoll Exchange and Google AdX. It also purchases from publishers' private exchanges.
Wilson told Advertising Age the company's revenue tripled in 2012 to more than $50 million, with about half of that money coming from ad-buying technology and the other from a video ad network business.
TubeMogul is tapping a rich new revenue stream. While digital video advertising was worth about $1 billion in the first half of 2012 alone, "real-time bidding accounts for just a fraction of that," the story said. Wilson believes now is a good time to get funding and accelerate growth in that market.
For more:
- Advertising Age has this story
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