OpenAds (United Kingdom) - Jan 2008

unquote
01 January 2008

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In a second round of funding, Accel Partners has led a £7.9m investment into Openads, provider of an open-source advertising server for online publishers, taking a significant minority stake in the business. Existing investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also participated in the financing, along with several private individuals. Accel principal Andrew Braccia sourced the deal directly through Openads CEO James Bilefield, with whom he has previously worked, when the latter toured the West Coast in November 2007 to find a financial sponsor based in the US. The investor was attracted to the deal by the scale of the company’s global presence with publishers, as well as the fact that the sector is one in which it has an on-going interest. The new capital will be used to continue product development and finance international expansion efforts, particularly in the US.

Company

Originally founded as a technology division within digital advertising agency Unanimis, London-based Openads was established as a stand alone business in June 2007 when it received its first funding round. The company operates a free, open source advertising server, which is used by more than 30,000 publishers in more than 100 countries worldwide, that enables advertisers to schedule, manage and track online campaigns. A new hosted version of the software is due to be launched that will remove the need for publishers to run the software on their own servers, making the process simpler and easier.

People

Andrew Braccia led the investment for Accel and will join the Openads board. James Bilefield is the CEO of the company.

Advisers

Company - Bird & Bird, Angus Miln (Legal)Equity - Heller Ehrman, Chris Grew (Legal)

Sourced from: UK & Ireland unquote" 362 (Feb 2008)