Mike On Ads

I’m super excited to announce that, as of today, we’ve closed on a $50M Series C funding. We’ve raised this round from existing investors and one of our key strategic clients, Microsoft. I think this is a great validation not just of the company, but also of the real-time bidding (RTB) space in general. You can read more about it in our press release found here

Also… we are hiring across the board! We are looking for great talent – especially on the engineering side. From rock-star, amazing engineers and product managers (ranging from junior, entry-level to team leads and directors) to work on data pipelines, adserving and bidding, user-interfaces, web services and general management. If you are someone amazing — or know someone amazing — that might want to work on some crazy, globally-distributed technology, send them my way (mike at appnexus dot com) or check our careers site here: http://www.appnexus.com/careers/

For you less technical folks, we are also hiring for services, account management, finance and marketing!

Going through my blog I realized that I never added even the slightest bit of info here about my new venture. Part of the reason was it took us forever to get a proper website up and running. Well, we’re 9 months in and finally have a public presence, so I thought it’d be a good time to blog about it.

In September of 2007 I co-founded AppNexus together with Brian O’Kelley. AppNexus is a virtualized global cloud computing platform specifically tailored for online advertising applications. The nature of advertising, having tags spread around hundreds if not thousands of sites, means that most companies in our industry deal with many millions, if not billions of requests every single day. The SLAs that our customers place on those requests can be incredibly strict — generally requiring not only high performance serving & load-balancing infrastructure but also that said infrastructure is spread out globally to reduce the latency to end-users. Even worse, traffic can fluctuate greatly from day to day depending on the media-buys and campaigns that are running at that moment.

Using our API tools & services our customers can roll-out an application across multiple datacenters in minutes versus the many months it normally takes to secure data center contracts, order & install hardware, configure the core network & servers and configure & deploy redundant network providers & global load-balancing. Of course our cloud works for more than just advertising — it’s great for analytics & gaming as well. Anything where you need a low-latency environment (both between servers & the end-users with geographic redundancy).

Interested? Check out our website, our wiki, shoot me an email (mike@appnexus.com or mike@mikeonads.com) or contact our sales team (sales@appnexus.com).