AppNexus, a US-based maker of online advertising applications, has raised $50m in its series C round from software company 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.
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.
Rik van der Kooi, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Advertiser & Publisher Solutions group, said: "We view AppNexus as a clear leader in the emerging real-time bidding space. Deepening our relationship with AppNexus will accelerate the availability of real-time demand via the Microsoft Advertising Exchange offering, providing broader access to our ad inventory."
AppNexus, based in New York City, provides clients with single-point buying access to the major real-time ad exchange offerings, such as those available through Google and Microsoft, and to other inventory aggregators.
In addition, AppNexus provides a set of ad management capabilities for executing and optimizing both real-time and directly negotiated media buys.
Since its launch in 2007, AppNexus has more than 120 ad networks in 12 countries and auctions more than four billion ads daily, constituting 676% year-over-year growth. Recently, AppNexus complemented its two US-based data centres by opening one in the Netherlands, to tap into the European Union and the Middle East.