AdStage Launches Its Cross-Network Ad Creator, Raises $1.4M

AdStage, a startup aiming to make it easy for small businesses and other advertisers to run cross-network ad campaigns, launched today at the Launch conference in San Francisco.

The company also announced that it has raised $1.4 million in funding, with an investor list that includes Freestyle Capital, Quest Venture Partners, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Digital Garage, XG Ventures, Mark Mullen, former Facebook/Myspace/Zynga executive Owen Van Natta, Jim Patterson, Stewart Alsop, Federated Media founder John Battelle, Rich LeFurgy, and Doug Barry.

You can watch co-founder and CEO Sahil Jain’s presentation here, where you can see the ad creator in action (and listen as Robert Scoble declares “This is the hottest idea I’ve seen so far”). The company offers a single, self-serve dashboard for creating ads that run across Google, Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn. Every feature seems designed to create an optimized campaign with as little work as possible. Most notably, AdStage provides recommendations throughout the process based on data from similar and competitive companies.

Those recommendations can help businesses write the ads and select keywords, as well as figure out the best way to spend across all four networks. And after the campaign has been launched, AdStage can look at the results in realtime and alter how much money goes into each network to deliver the best return.

Prior to AdStage, Jain co-founded mobile development startup Trigger.io. The company launched in private beta last week, and plans to add 50 more advertisers soon. Jain said that AdStage will be adding other ad formats, too.