OpenX Blog

Hi there - as I am sure many people already saw, we just raised an additional $10.4m in our third round of funding. For those who are interested, here a few examples of the media coverage: The Times of London, Financial Times, The New York Times, MarketWatch, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MediaPost, and paidContent.org.

We’re obviously delighted to be able to do this in what is clearly a very tough time for many businesses and more specifically, a difficult time for early-stage companies to raise money.

I thought this was a good opportunity to spend a minute explaining what we are trying to achieve at OpenX and then put this financing in that context.

Our mission is simple - to help online businesses grow. We have two strategies to help us achieve that mission:

• Ad Technology. We aim to provide a very comprehensive, extremely flexible ad technology platform that 100,000s of businesses online can use to power their online advertising. Integral to this strategy is the flexibility our open-source approach enables, which allows our users to innovate on top of our platform and thereby truly define and drive their own product roadmaps.
• Ad Monetization. We aim to power an online advertising exchange that helps publishers make more money and ad buyers of all kinds (advertisers, agencies, networks) more easily target and buy media across a very broad swathe of publishers online.

Just in the last six months we have evolved quite a bit. For example, on the ad technology side, we:

• Now provide the OpenX platform in both hosted or download versions.
• Now offer premium services (premium hosted, premium support and professional services) to customers for whom these services make sense.
• Recently launched a major new release (2.8) with a rich set of new features, including a complete plug-in architecture to aid with extensions, eCPM optimization to help publishers make more money and improved stats scalability. And further updates are coming shortly.

And of course, on the ad monetization side, we formally launched OpenX Market in mid-April and we’re off to a really good start, increasing from 1 billion ad impressions to 2 billion in a month.

As a result of all this, we’ve seen terrific growth in both our user base and in our revenue lines, all of which are less than 6 months old.

However, we think we’re just getting started. We still have plenty to improve on and see an amazing opportunity ahead to help many 100,000s more businesses grow their online revenues by using OpenX ad technology and monetization products and services.

The new financing, which buttresses a significant amount of cash we still have from our last round, will help us carefully accelerate certain parts of our strategy when appropriate. It will also secure OpenX as we move steadily towards profitability and will make sure that OpenX is around for a long time as we further build out our products and the community of people and businesses who use them, extend them and contribute to them.

As ever, thanks so much for your support. Please use the products, give us feedback and get involved in the community - whether on the forums or IRC, as a contributor, plug-in developer, beta tester, translator or in simply spreading the word.

All the best
Tim