Smaato, a company offering advertising tools for mobile publishers and developers, is announcing that it has raised $25 million in Series E funding.
Founded back in 2005, Smaato‘s offerings include a supply-side platform for managing ad inventory, as well as an exchange for dealing with multiple ad networks. The company has now raised a total of $47 million, and it says that since its last funding round at the beginning of 2011, the publisher base has grown from 11,686 to 78,000.
Co-founder and CEO Ragnar Kruse also told me that Smaato is profitable. So he didn’t raise the new funding to cover existing costs, but rather to help the company continue “looking forward and investing.” Kruse said the market for mobile advertising will continue to grow — not exactly a controversial claim, but he specifically argued that despite the buzz around wearable devices like smartwatches, smartphones will remain the “digital hub” for new gadgets: “The real tornado is around the smartphones.”
Kruse added that although Smaato’s “sweet spot” has been mid-tier mobile publishers, he hopes to recruit higher end publishers too. (To do that, the company will be launching private ad exchanges.)
The round came from Asian media company Singapore Press Holdings, along with previous investors Aeris CAPITAL, EDBI, and others. Asked whether this means Smaato will become increasingly focused on Asia, Kruse said that’s not really the case — the company has already built a global business, with offices in San Francisco (its headquarters), New York, Hamburg, Singapore, and Jakarta. Each of those teams is largely independent and focused on its assigned market, he said.
Chief Strategy Officer Ajitpal Pannu added that Smaato has done something that’s particularly difficult for US.-.based companies — it has built “a successful operational business” in India and the Asia-Pacific region.
He characterized the company as dealing with “regional supply and global demand.” Smaato, Pannu said, can use programmatic technology to help global brands reach their desired audience by connecting them with the right publishers in each region.
