Mobile ad network Todacell, announced on Tuesday it's raised an additional $1 million round of funding from existing investor AfterDox. The extra $1 million will be added to another $1 million round the company raised in June of 2009 from AfterDox. The start also raised $350,000 in seed funding from the Fore Group. The funding comes at an interesting time in the mobile ad space. Recently Apple acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million, a startup building ads for smartphones. Shortly before Apples's acquisition, Google bought AdMob, another mobile ad platform, for $750 million. The big players are definitely looking at this emerging sector in advertising as smartphone adoption continues to grow. J.P. Morgan's Imran Kahn estimates the mobile display advertising space will grow 81% this year from $140 million in 2009 to $253 million in 2010.
Todacell said its technology examines and maps a publisher’s ad inventory based on user data, location, time, and the performance of ad campaigns on that publisher’s mobile website or application. Some of the publishers the startup is working with include Fring, MobiLuck, Mocospace and TuneWiki. Beyond simply focusing on smartphones, Todacell is also looking at other mobile devices like hand-held gaming consoles. The Israel-based startup said its platform can work on systems built by Nintendo, Sony, and soon Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle. Although, I've yet to see a mobile ad on a Nintendo DS game, especially since you have to pay about $30 bucks a cartridge. The company said its successfully ran campaigns on hand-held gaming devices for Orange (telecom) in Europe.
Moshe Vaknin, Todacell's CEO and founder stated, "to meet global advertiser demand and publisher interest, Todacell is using this round of funding to open five offices in key US and international markets." The five new sales offices will be located in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Bombay.
