Connexity caps funding at $3 million
Ventura-based digital advertising firm Connexity has raised $1.1 million in a financing round led by Santa Barbara-based Rincon Venture Partners with participation from Santa Monica-based Siemer Ventures and has quit seeking seed funding.
Connexity was founded by a group of digital ad veterans who previously founded Fastclick, which was sold to Westlake Village-based ValueClick for $214 million in 2005. Connexity’s systems aim to help advertisers find and buy the correct online audience for their ads.
Connexity has raised $3 million total to date, with investments also coming from Persistence Partners and Fastclick co-founders Jeff Pryor and Dave Gross.
Gross, who serves as Connexity’s CEO, said the company is finished raising money for now and will focus on shifting from testing to wide scale deployment of its systems. “We will likely be profitable” based on the $3 million taken in so far, Gross told the Business Times. The money will be used to fund new hires, he said.
Rincon Venture Partners’ John Greathouse, himself a veteran of the successful startup that later became Citrix Online in Goleta, will join Connexity’s board of directors. In a news release, Greathouse said his fund was attracted to Connexity because of the founders’ track record at Fastclick of achieving profitability with a small upfront investment.
“Advertisers are hungry for new marketing solutions that engage online users with more relevant ads, rather than interrupt and annoy them,” Greathouse said in the announcement. “Connexity is leading the charge within the emerging, engagement-oriented advertising paradigm.”
