Funding the Rubicon Project

Just a few month’s after entering beta the Rubicon Project, a publisher-side ad inventory automation system, received an additional $15 million in financing. This brings the company’s total funding to $21 million.

A beta checkpoint includes over 1,000 Web sites signed up for the service, and over 10 billion ad impressions served. The funding will be used to build the infrastructure and staff to support demand. There’s a need for global expansion even at the company’s early stage. “We’re actually dealing with a lot of international ad networks today,” said Rubicon Project CEO and founder Frank Adante. He reports about 50 percent of impressions come from traffic outside the U.S. While the technology platform is self-service, and doesn’t require a presence in the where the company does business, but a few overseas operations may be in order. “The first step is to analyze markets we want to enter on the publisher side,” said Adante. The first targets will likely be Europe and Asia, especially since IDG Ventures Asia is among the investors in the round.

Adante said the ability to siphon international traffic to local ad networks and impressions is “helping publishers make more money with the ad space.”

Acquisitions are another goal of the funding. “We’ve got a pretty big mission, to automate online advertising. Step one for us is to better facilitate relationships between publishers and ad networks,” Adante said. Some of the mission may be filled in the acquisition of technology to run Rubicon Project functions.