OpenX Blog

Over the last four years, my team and I have been tirelessly building what we consider the best - and most widely used - adserver on the web. It is a huge responsibility to build the software that powers such a large percentage of all online advertising.

Today we are announcing that we have taken a huge step forward in the lifecycle of Openads. We have agreed to partner with some of the industry’s best investors - Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, and a number of incredible angel investors - to help Openads realise its vision: to become the platform that all websites use to make money online.

One of the major reasons that we chose Index as our lead investor is that they have a deep understanding of open source companies (as investors in MySQL, Zend, and Pentaho), as well as community products (both Index and Mangrove were investors in Skype, and Index also invested in Last.fm). That is a huge level of relevant experience that is backing Openads. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have them on board.

What does this mean for Openads? Openads will always remain a free, open source adserver. Openads will continue to focus on building features that the community wants, so that we have the simplest, most powerful, and most widespread adserver on the planet. The investment means that new versions of software will be released faster than ever.

There are so many people who have been involved with Openads over the years. Our team has done amazing work on our new version of software. The Openads community has provided us invaluable insight into what features to build (and what bugs to fix!). We have received lots of patches from developers worldwide. Community moderators tirelessly answer questions on the forums and IRC. We have security experts from every corner of earth ensuring our software is bulletproof. Openads is truly a community effort - built upon the efforts of those before me (Niels, Matteo, and many others) who have spent many hours per day developing, answering questions, educating others, etc.

The PR announcement is here.

Thanks to everyone involved - this next step promises to be an exciting one for Openads.