Nanigans gets $3M for ad platform on Facebook

Real-time bidding on Facebook, which makes up one in three display ad impressions on the Web

Nanigans, a real-time bidding platform for Facebook, announced Tuesday that it has closed $3 million in Series A financing led by Avalon Ventures, with participation from some “prominent” Boston-based angel investors.

Rich Levandov, managing director at Avalon and the one who led an early-stage investment in social gaming giant Zynga, will be joining the company’s board of directors.

Ad Engine is the central offering from Nanigans, a self-service software platform that uses the Facebook Ads API to provide targeting, multivariate testing and real-time bidding, all toward the end of improving ROI for ad buyers.

As Nanigans notes, Facebook now accounts for nearly one in three display ad impressions on the Web for the U.S., according to comScore data published in May. Because of this, Nanigans is well-positioned to succeed in delivering a better-optimized campaign management platform.

“Facebook is unprecedented in its reach and targeting parameters, and advertising dollars are following. Our Ad Engine enables marketers to automate the delivery of social ads at scale,” explained Ric Calvillo, founder and CEO of Nanigans, “and in a way that focuses on delivering customers, and not clicks.”

The company serves several well-funded and otherwise successful tech startups, such as RockYou, Lolapps (just merged with 6Waves), Kabam (closed $85 million in May), Kixeye (closed $18 million last week), Gilt Groupe (closed $138 million in May), CrowdStar, PopCap (just acquired by EA), Zoosk and over 200 more.

The new funding will be used to hire more employees and to expand the platform. Current job listings include open positions for an ad operations manager, a UI developer and a business development associate.

In addition to the new funding, Nanigans says it has made several executive hires recently:

• Rishi Dean, SVP Product, a former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and the first employee of Visible Measures and helping build the company into the leading online video measurement platform
• Derek Yimoyines, VP Engineering, who led software development at Avenue100 Media
• John Saitta, SVP Operations, former VP of Operations at Visible Measures and VP of Information Technology at Vanguard Direct.