Medialets today announced a new $6M series B round of financing to help continue the company’s expansion and further it’s leading rich media mobile advertising solution.
The new round was led by investor Foundry Group, with participation from DFJ Gotham, 500 Startups and Chris Saridakis. Medialets plans to use the new cash infusion to expand the capabilities of its mobile rich media ad platform and supporting tools in order to “bring rich media ads to the broadest range of advertisers possible.” The company has only been around a short two years, but has made significant progress in its short existence.
“Medialets was founded in 2008 on the understanding that mobile would unleash a powerful engagement opportunity for advertisers,” said Medialets CEO Eric Litman in a press release. “Since then, not only has Medialets enabled the industry’s most compelling mobile rich media for premier publishers, agencies and brands, we’ve also built out a one-of-a-kind cross-platform infrastructure that brings greater efficiency and scale to mobile rich media campaigns. This Series B funding allows us to continue to evolve the Medialets’ platform to meet the phenomenal demand for high-value mobile rich media.”
In a blog post on the subject, Litman divulged some interesting history on where Medialets got its start. “We started with the Feedburner model of free developer tools – in our case, application analytics – as a means to build an ad network, with the intent to dive into that data to get a better understanding of what ultimately would work as an ad model,” he explained. “We launched our first rich media ad in April of 2009, a shakeable ad for Dockers and OMD, and immediately was flooded with interest from both brands and publishers wanting to do similar things. But there was a rub: the brands looking to do this kind of advertising generally wanted to advertise in well known publishers’ apps, and the publishers who wanted to do rich media ads wanted to keep them as premium ad products and sell them themselves, rather than have them sold by a network. So with a bit of tuning, we shifted away from an ad network to a platform that allowed publishers to sell rich media ads direct to brands.”
