Video marketing company TubeMogul is closing 2012 with a bang. Known for PlayTime, its video advertising platform, the company announced Thursday that it secured $20 million in Series C financing. It has now raised a total of $35 million in funds to date.
Grant le Riche
This latest round of funds will go towards hiring more staff – from marketing and sales people to engineers – in new offices to be opened around the world, and enhancing its position in real-time buying of video ads globally.
Grant le Riche, the company’s managing director in Canada, told Marketing that Canada is a huge priority for the company. Officially launched in Canada in August, TubeMogul is putting emphasis on expanding its efforts and team here, since the inventory available in Canada is far better than in the U.S. in terms of which video RTB sites are available, le Riche said.
“There are about 30% of comScore’s Top 100 premium tier one sites available for bidding within Canada, which is a bit more than what’s available for bidding in the U.S.,” said le Riche.
He said TubeMogul does 23 million in-stream pre-roll streams per day in Canada, adding that “in terms of volume and video inventory becoming more available for bidding within our platform, within Canada we’re growing inventory at a rate of 7% every month.”
This new injection of financial backing will help grow the company’s teams in Toronto (where le Riche predicts between eight and 10 people will be hired in 2013), as well as Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax.
Two hires were already recently made in Toronto: Scott Mitchell, who was previously with Microsoft and Yahoo, and former TotallyHer sales executive Jessica McGrogan. Both have been brought on as senior account executives.
Led by Northgate Capital, this latest funding round will see managing director Tommy Vardell joining the board of directors at TubeMogul.
TubeMogul says its platform is meant to maximize the branding power of video advertising and gives brand marketers the power to handle all parts of a media buy – including the specific sites on which their ads are displayed and which audiences see them – while receiving results on brand impact and cost.
The company has already established impressive momentum since launching its real-time buying platform, which is focused solely on video advertising, roughly two years ago. The company said its revenue has doubled from $17.8 million in 2011, and it has hired nearly 60 employees in the last six months.
Commenting on the scalability of TubeMogul’s real-time video ad platform, CEO and co-founder Brett Wilson said in a release that it could “easily run 10 times the volume of ads than it does today.”
Previous investors Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures—the first institutional investor in TubeMogul—also participated in the recent round of financing.
Based in Emeryville, Cali., TubeMogul has offices worldwide, including Toronto, London, New York, Austin and Singapore.
