AdRise Raises $2 Million From Foundation Capital To Put Video (And Ads) On More Connected TVs

Roku, Samsung, LG, Google TV — with all these connected devices in the market, it was only a matter of time before users started to, you know, hook them up and watch streaming video on them. That’s finally starting to happen, although a bit more slowly then some would like.

There’s just one problem. Making apps for all those different devices isn’t easy, and monetizing those videos is even harder. AdRise hopes to provide a solution, by building cross-platform apps that can be watched on multiple different devices, as well as an ad delivery service for monetization. And it’s raised a $2 million funding round led by Foundation Capital to do so.

AdRise launched primarily as a way to deliver video ads to a number of connected devices, and spent the first year of its existence building relationships with connected TV and other device manufacturers to integrate its ad serving capabilities into their products. It’s got a ton of devices on board that it can deliver ads, including Roku, Google TV, Yahoo TV, Samsung, Sony, Vizio, and LG connected devices, as well as the big game consoles.

Now it’s working on helping content owners and video publishers get onto those devices, with a platform for building and delivering apps to a number of connected devices. To do that, it’s building apps for content makers for free, with the understanding that when they try to monetize it will also provide the ad delivery infrastructure to do so… And it will take a cut of any ads that run over its platform.

AdRise has signed up over 70 content partners with that business model, and is connected to most of the top 15 ad networks and DSPs. With that infrastructure built out, its seen viewership of its apps grow 25x over the past year, to more than 750,000 hours of content per month. It’s also run more than ad 100 campaigns for those publishers across multiple devices.

AdRise is based in San Francisco and currently has about a dozen employees, but will be using the capital to ramp up personnel while going after the growing streaming video market. Along with the funding, Foundation Capital’s Ashmeet Sidana — also on the board of video ad company FreeWheel — will also join AdRise’s board of directors.