Centro raises $22.5M in Series A round

The media buying services company was recently ranked one of Deloitte's fastest growing companies

Updated 1/3/11: Centro's previous round of funding was in 2005, not January 2010. 

Happy New Year, Centro.  The Chicago-based digital media services company just closed a $22.5 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC form filed Thursday.  The company could not be reached for comment and the investors have not been disclosed, but the form lists Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker and Eric Byunn, partner at FTV Capital, as Director.

Founded in 2001, Centro works with ad agencies and media companies to simplify the media buying process.  The company’s proprietary technology, Transis, takes care of the mundane details, including research, strategic planning, negotiating, buying, optimizing, trafficking, and billing to speed up the buying process and get media campaigns implemented faster.

Successful campaigns that have used Centro’s platform include Sprint 4G Broadband, Comcast Xfinity, The Social Network movie campaign, Allstate, NBC’s TV series The Chase, MetroPCS, and more.  Centro works with over 350 ad agencies, representing more than 1,100 advertisers.

In October, Centro ranked number 89 in Deloitte’s 2010 Technology Fast 500, which ranks the top 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and clean tech companies in America.  The rankings are based on percentage of fiscal year revenue growth between 2005 and 2009, and Centro’s revenue grew by 1,297% during that period.

Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker believes that the company’s impressive revenue growth is attributable to its focus on technology innovation to improve digital media efficiency.

“The in-house use of Transis and then its public launch earlier this year offered the industry an unprecedented ability to streamline its media buying process, and the response has been overwhelming,” said Riegsecker in a prepared statement. “We’ve had more than 40 agencies partner with us to use Transis in just the last six months.”

Centro previously raised a $275,000 round of financing back in 2005 (under the name Integrent).  And in 2008 the company acquired the online newspaper buying service Real Cities from the McClatchy Company to “unify the newspaper industry and make it easier for national advertisers to spend dollars with newspaper web sites.”

Image source: Centro.net