AppNexus, an online advertising company backed by US-listed software maker Microsoft, has reportedly turned profitable and may go public late next year.
Brian O’Kelley, founder and chief executive of AppNexus, told newswire Bloomberg: "The financials, the revenue, the profit and the growth are all strong enough that we could be going public as soon as late next year."
In October last year, AppNexus raised $50m in its series C round from Microsoft and venture capital firms.
Series C investors included all of AppNexus’ series B venture capital backers that invested $8m in September 2008: Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners and First Round Capital. However, Khosla Ventures, which had been mentioned as an original investor in AppNexus, was not mentioned in this latest round of financing.
Bloomberg said AppNexus’s investors also included angels Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Bloomberg is an investor in Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
Microsoft has usually avoided public investment of corporate venturing after concentrating more on building partnerships and the entrepreneurial use of its software in non-financial ways after being hit by the dot.com implosion at the start of the decade. However, the firm has made one venture-style investment a year for the past decade since stopping, the firm said for strategic reasons.