AdReady Raise more with 5.3M from Kholsa, Bain, and Madrona
By Azam on May 10, 2010 
AdReady adds more cash to display more ads in a banner raise and board additions. The company was co-founded by Aaron Finn in 2006 and had raised $12 million prior to this funding round, from investors such as Madrona Venture Group, Bain Capital Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.
AdReady was founded by experienced team from aQuantive that was acquired by Microsoft for 6B to enter the online advertising business. Karl Siebrecht spent eight years at aQuantive, including time as president of the Atlas technology division. He then spent two-plus years at Microsoft as a general manager in online services after the acquisition. Siebrecht joined AdReady as president and chief operating officer three months ago, and recently named CEO . He succeeds co-founder Aaron Finn, who is staying on full-time as chairman of the board and chief strategy officer.
AdReady has developed tools that make display ads (banner ads, as opposed to search-engine ads) faster, cheaper, and more efficient to produce and monitor for a broad class of online advertisers—especially small businesses. The company started in 2006 and raised a total of $12 million from investors including Madrona Venture Group, Bain Capital Ventures, and Khosla Ventures. Its customers and partners include advertisers, ad agencies, and publishers like the New York Times, ESPN, and Yahoo.
In the online ad category, I believe there’s significant untapped potential in display advertising,” Siebrecht says. “Search advertising is fantastic, it works well, it’s a very large business. But what we see in display is very, very limited in terms of the number of advertisers that can do it effectively. There are only a few thousand advertisers in the U.S. who do it, as compared to the 1.4 million search [ad] customers that Google says they have. Yet there is a tremendous amount of supply of display advertising inventory. The largest and most sophisticated advertisers actually have [display] budgets larger than search budgets. If you’re really big, you can get display to work quite well. If you’re small, you’re not even in the market.”
Categories : Media & Ads, Tech, viralTags : Aaron Finn, AdReady, aQuantive, Banner Advertising, Display Advertising, ESPN, Karl Siebrecht, Microsoft, New York Times, yahoo