Rapt Media Raises $3.1 Million For Interactive Video Advertising Platform

Rapt Media, a developer of interactive digital video technologies and services, has raised $3.1 million in new financing as it looks to expand its geographical presence.

The Boulder, Colo.-based company will use money from the round led by Boulder Ventures to open offices in the media centers of New York and Los Angeles.

As video advertising continues to grow online, Rapt Media is hoping that more marketers will turn to its customizable advertising platform, according to chief executive and co-founder Erika Trautman.

Using the company’s technology, advertisers can guide an audience through a sales pitch that is tailored to the answers a viewer provides.

“Video is the fastest growing format in branding and advertising, and mobile is the fastest growing form factor in the consumption of content,” said Peter Roshko, General Partner at Boulder Ventures, in a statement.

By 2016, online advertising spending is expected to reach $5 billion, up from $2.8 billion in 2013, while television advertising revenues will decline over the same period, according to a report from Business Insider. Pew Research puts digital video spending at roughly $4.15 billion of the total $42.58 billion spent on digital advertising as a whole in 2013.

With so much money chasing the advertising market, new features in digital advertising — like interactivity — will become increasingly commonplace. Rapt looks to protect its position in the nascent market for interactive video content with five patents that the company filed around its technology, with the first patent filed in 2011.

Trautman and her partner actually relocated from San Francisco to Boulder in 2011 to launch Rapt, which the two had developed while working at a boutique video production company and a video game developer, respectively.

Admitted to the TechStars 2011 cohort in Boulder, the couple began fundraising and developing their products and services, signing on NBCUniversal as an initial customer and raising an initial $4.4 million over several tranches of seed financing.

Along with the new raise, Rapt is also launching an integration with the automated marketing technologies available from the Oracle subsidiary, Eloqua.