AdStage, which allows advertisers to create and manage campaigns across Google, Facebook, and other networks, is announcing that it has raised $1 million in additional funding.
The money comes from previous investor Digital Garage and brings the startup’s total funding to more than $2.5 million. Co-founder and CEO Sahil Jain said AdStage still had “a lot of money available,” but raising additional cash allows it to grow more aggressively. He argued that there’s a big opportunity right now as the online advertising market is “continuing to fragment,” turning a unifying product like AdStage into “the medicine in this space.”
The company launched its first product, AdStage Express, a year ago at the Launch conference. Then, last fall, it announced a broader platform, which Jain described at the time as “more of a one-stop shop” — an ad management tool that integrates with outside services, too.
Those integrations are now a real thing, Jain said. He plans to demonstrate the first third-party AdStage Apps on-stage at Launch today, specifically apps from Wordtracker, Unbounce, and Optimizely, as well as the AdStage-developed Ad Scrambler, a tool for quickly testing the effectiveness of different ad variations.
AdStage is also expanding the platform with an app partnership program and platform API. Until now, the company was reaching out to each of its partners, but now it’s opening up, so any app developer can apply to integrate with the platform. (At the same time, Jain said he’s not interested in “becoming a marketplace business,” because he wants to keep the amount of apps manageable for customers.)
The company says its customers have 8,600 active campaigns across Google, Facebook, Bing, and LinkedIn, with 6,000 businesses signed up for the wait list. It’s currently charging a $99 a month, though Jain acknowledged that’s very much a temporary promotion and an experiment: “We’re not going to make this a billion-dollar business that way.”