AdStage Raises $1M, Rolls out Advertising Platform Apps and API
AdStage, provider of a self-service advertising platform that it bills as a single place to build, manage and optimize ad campaigns across search, social, mobile and display ad networks, has raised $1 million in additional seed funding by Digital Garage, an existing investor known for its investment in Twitter. This brings total funding for AdStage to more than $2.5 million since the company launched last year. AdStage expects to use the capital to increase the size of its engineering team from the current 11 to more than 20 by the end of 2014.
“The industry has historically punished ad tech companies because they were really agencies masquerading as tech companies,” said Sahil Jain, CEO and co-founder of AdStage, in a statement. “We’re ushering in a new era of ad technology and using this new capital to pour fuel on that fire. We’re aggressively hiring and pushing forward in full force.”
AdStage also announced a new App Partnership Program, which allows developers of complementary marketing apps to integrate their products directly into AdStage using the new AdStage Platform API. Partners can then manage, market and monetize their apps to advertisers on AdStage through the app gallery and co-marketing campaigns. AdStage App Partners include Wordtracker, Unbounce, Optimizely, ReTargeter, Bigstock, Canned Banners, MixRank and Thinkstock by Getty Images.
“Our goal with apps isn’t to create a massive marketplace,” said Jain. “The idea is to bring the most relevant and high-value cohort of apps under one roof for paid marketing, make them easy to access within the context of campaign management and extend the feature set of AdStage for our users.”
AdStage this week is introducing several new apps that expand the platform’s functionality:
- Ad Scrambler, developed in-house by AdStage, allows advertisers to quickly create and AB test dozens of ad variations across multiple networks automatically.
- The Wordtracker keyword discovery app helps advertisers find relevant keywords to populate their paid search campaigns without leaving AdStage.
- New apps for Unbounce and Optimizely allow advertisers to build and test landing pages to maximize the revenue they generate from each click.
The addition of these apps brings the number of apps now available within AdStage to 10.
The AdStage Platform is available now with promotional beta pricing of $99 per month with a 30-day free trial. According to the company, AdStage has over $500,000 of daily budgeted ad spend between 8,600 active campaigns across Google, Facebook, Bing and LinkedIn.
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