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Advertising - Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Rubicon Project Raises $6M For Ad Network Optimization

We met with the CEO of Rubicon yesterday afternoon and plan to demo Rubicon later in the week. We had posted that Rubicon raised funding back in September. The news today from Rubicon is that it has raised a first round of $6M. Clearstone Venture Partners invested $4M and Square1Bank allowed $2M in venture debt.

CEO Frank Addante explained that Rubicon came together after he had left his prior company, StrongMail Systems, and returned to Los Angeles where he hooked up again with members of a previous startup - L90 - an online ad firm that went public and was bought by Doubleclick. They took a fresh look at the online ad market and determined that not much had changed in online advertising but what was new was the proliferation of online ad networks, which makes it nearly impossible for publishers to optimize the best performing network for them (we couldn't agree more.)

The Rubicon Project's web-based, self-service answer it to match any size website with the optimal money-making opportunity across the 300+ ad networks. Addante says they have been testing the service with some publishers but plan to launch in public Beta on October 8th.

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