Iris Capital, a venture capital group which manages mobile phone operator Orange and advertising services Publicis Group’s joint corporate venturing initiative, has joined a consortium investing $12m in the series B round of MoPub, a US-based mobile advertising company.
Japan state and corporate-backed venture capital firm Jafco Ventures led the B round as a new investor, with participation from existing investors, venture capital firms Accel Partners and Harrison Metal Capital.
Accel and Harrison previously invested $6.5m in MoPub’s A round in July last year.
Elain Szu, director of marketing at MoPub, said the strategic investment from Iris Capital would help the company build its relationships with agencies and brand partners. She said: “Today our partners in our mobile marketplace product are demand-side platforms…and what these guys do is their relationships are more directly tied to agencies and brand advertisers, and that’s their customer base.”
Denis Barrier, partner at Iris Capital, said: “MoPub can offer the most relevant and massive programmatic mobile inventory of the industry to Orange and Publicis. The strategic collaborations between them and MoPub should also enable our sponsors to provide an unmatched inventory quality to their customers, and increase their leadership in the mobile ad industry”.
Publicis controls ad agencies VivaKi, Razorfish and Digitas and last week MoPub hired Paul gelb from Razorfish as its head of strategy.
MoPub, which was founded by former AdMob and Google team members in 2010 and was part of startup accelerator AngelPad’s first class, is an advertising server and exchange.
The company connects smartphone application publishers with advertising opportunities, through direct advertising, ad networks, or the proprietary MoPub Marketplace, which is akin to a stock exchange for mobile advertising and lets buyers bid on ad impressions in real-time.
Since its launch in November 2010, MoPub serves over 15 billion ads per month across 10,000 apps and 5,000 publishers.