AdRoll, one of the leaders in online ad retargeting, has raised a new $15 million round of funding.
Back in February, the company announced that it had quadrupled revenue and become profitable in 2011. AdRoll now says it has more than 5,000 customers and is adding almost 500 new ones every month.
The round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from previous investors Merus Capital and Accel Partners. (AdRoll raised a $4 million first round way back in 2008.) Foundation’s Charles Moldow is joining the board, and in the funding press release he calls AdRoll “the best-in-breed platform” and says that “nearly every brand selling goods or services online now recognizes retargeting as an essential marketing tool.”
Retargeting means that ads are targeted based a consumer’s past behavior, usually if they visit a website but leave without making a purchase. When I spoke to Vice President of Sales Suresh Khanna earlier this year, he told me that before he left Google and joined AdRoll, he’d had a “knee jerk” reaction to the concept — but he argued that retargeting should be about more than just bombarding someone with kitchen knife ads if they abandon an online shopping cart with knives. Instead, the industry needs to “push beyond that” to take advantage of “all the data you have on all your customers.”
AdRoll says its plans include increasing the reach of its real-time inventory and introducing mobile, video, and social products. It was recently announced as an initial partner on the Facebook Exchange, a real-time bidding system where visitors to outside websites are marked with a cookie and then shown related ads when they come to Facebook. We’re now hearing that AdRoll is putting serious engineering resources into the exchange.
AdRoll is the largest retargeting platform with over 5,000 active advertisers in the US and around the world. Our mission is to make powerful performance display advertising techniques simple for business of all sizes. 96% of customers who try AdRoll stick with it. We maximize ROI for many great brands you’ve heard of (Groupon, Microsoft, Tivo, Hipmunk, Cooking.com) and many more you haven’t. Retargeting works by keeping track of people who visit your site and displaying your ads to them...
Foundation Capital is an investment firm run primarily by entrepreneurs. Each partner left a successful career in industry to work in venture capital in order to work with other entrepreneurs to build great new companies. They have backed successful entrepreneurs across various sectors — from enterprise software to clean technology to consumer Internet and fabless semiconductors. Typically, Foundation makes an initial investment of $1 to $10 million and follow that by participating in each subsequent round of financing. As...
Merus Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build successful software and Internet companies. Merus focus areas include Commerce, Cloud and Mobile. Merus Capital is founded by by Salman Ullah, former Vice President of Corporate Development at Google, Sean Dempsey, former Principal of Corporate Development at Google, and Peter Hsing, former Managing Director of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft.
Accel Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices located in Silicon Valley, New York, London, China, and India. They typically make multi-stage investments in internet technology companies. Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of excellence and innovation in the venture capital business and is dedicated to partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class companies. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo...
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