AppNexus, the New York-based advertising technology behemoth, is raising approximately $40 million on top of $60 million of new funding it’s already secured, according to Business Insider. The new funding values the company at $1.2 billion. Ad Tech companies have had a difficult time–IPOs in the sector invariably slid–even as Internet and mobile advertising make huge advances in ad dollars spent. AppNexus Serves in the neighborhood of 16 billion ads a day.
Last year Forbes India, in an article entitled “How AppNexus CEO Became the King of Ad Tech,” detailed how the 6’5″ 240-pound CEO Brian O’Kelley has built AppNexus into an ad machine that is second only to Google in the “$13 billion web display ad market.” It’s even bigger now. Formerly at Right Media, O’Kelley pioneered the “ad exchange” idea, which dominates Internet advertising today. The ad exchange is a real-time auction for available ad space that happens almost like speed trading.
