Supply-side platform (SSP) AdsNative received Thursday a $2 million injection of funding led by Interwest Partners, raising about $750K in convertible debt prior to this series.
The company also released a mechanism called Mediation/SSP, designed to maximize publisher fill rates for in-stream native ads.
AdsNative will devote the majority of the funds to getting more publishers and networks to use the platform. The California-based startup, founded in 2012, works with Politico, Slashdot, SourceForge, Rant Media Network and The Awl, and produces about 100 million ads per month.
“In order to maximize fill rates, [publishers] need to add more and more networks manually, which involves site-side HTML work,” said Satish Polisetti, CEO of AdsNative. “There is no way to automate the process or know which works best for the publisher. This is a pain both from an operational stand-point as well as additional burden to developers and publishers.”
The Mediation/SSP capability responds to a growing number of in-feed ad networks and exchanges that can often guarantee publishers more CPMs or offer real-time pricing but do not achieve 100% fill rates for publishers’ native ad inventories.
AdsNative’s latest feature is designed to give publishers the ability to access ad networks or exchanges from AdsNative’s dashboard and use its mediation technology to automatically verify that fill rates are met.
Included in the Mediation/SSP mechanism are tools for ad ops and sales teams to supplement direct sales and the ability to vend unsold inventory. AdsNative is also in the process of designing its own exchange, which will allow partners to access the native inventories of AdsNative’s publishers.
Polisetti views AdsNative as “a companion tool [for ad networks]. … We combine the power of what DoubleClick, Rubicon Project does for the new wave of native/premium/nonstandard ad experiences.” He added AdsNative is a “turnkey platform” that speeds the process from native ad campaign planning to execution.
