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Advertising - Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Two Other Ad Networks Funded: Teracent and ActiveAthlete

Foster City-based Teracent raised angel funding last year from KPG investors. Today we learn that it has raised around $5M in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, according to a regulatory filing summarized by PEHub.

Teracent has been slow to get up to speed its seems and has lost several techs to Google and others. The company claims to pay publishers in select categories on a CPM basis. They have limited themselves currently to two specific categories health/fitness/Beauty and Photography. But their marketing and presence in the marketplace as been very low profile. We'll see how the new funds change that.

Active Athlete Media also raised funding from KPG investors and Alsop Louie Partners. This is a niche advertising network focused on lifestyle sports.

The company claims to reaching more than 6M athletes each month through sites like Running Planet, Sports Power (laxpower.com), Daily Peloton and Fitness Singles (fitness-singles.com). The startup's CEO is Robert Tas who was most recently SVP of Media and Technology at 24/7 Real Media. This is yet another vertically focussed ad network, whose premise we buy into. Active Athlete Media has no chance of becoming a huge company but it does stand a good chance of becoming a healthy company in a sector with little competition.

View - Teracent site
View - Active Athlete Media site