Openads, the developer of a popular seven year old opensource ad server, have spun out of London based ad network Unanimis and raised $5 million in capital to fund their business. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Index Ventures’ Saul Klein joined the company’s board of directors. Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital also mentioned their investment it on his personal blog.
Openads, formerly called phpadsnew, is the most popular adserver solution when measured by number of publishers using it. They have 25,000 publishers using the sofware on 100,000 sites in 140 different countries and in 20 languages. About thirty ad networks have been built on top of it, including John Battelle’s FM Publishing.
The software is opensource under a GPL license, and so free to use. Openads will make money by layering services on top of the core software, something MySQL, WordPress, Zimbra and others have done successfully. More information on Openads here.
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