Round Led By Focus Ventures to Accelerate Rapid Growth
Redwood City, Calif.,—August 21, 2008—Turn Inc., the Smart Market for online advertising, today announced it has closed $15 million in private equity financing. The funding was led by Palo Alto based Focus Ventures and joined by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Trident Capital, and Shasta Ventures. This third round of funding brings Turn’s total equity investment to date to more than $37 million. The funding will be used to help further scale Turn’s market by creating new products that leverage its core technology, and enable Turn to expand its sales and client services teams in support of the increase in major client acquisitions.
This investment follows a period of remarkable growth for Turn. Since March 2008, Turn jumped 11 positions in comScore’s Top Ad Network ranking from number 27 to number 16. Turn’s monthly unique users increased more than 100 percent to 93 million over the same period while ad impressions jumped a dramatic 250 percent to 1.9 billion in July. Turn has become the preferred partner for national branded response advertisers looking for measurable performance from their online campaigns.
“Turn is taking online advertising to the next level — and we’re not just saying it, we’re doing it,” states Jim Barnett, CEO of Turn. “Our next generation approach combines revolutionary targeting with goal-based pricing models in a real time auction, delivering measurably superior performance to our advertisers and publishers. The investment from a leading firm such as Focus Ventures reflects our rapid progress and will help accelerate Turn to become the leader in the performance advertising space.”
“Turn is a unique investment opportunity for Focus. Their approach to online advertising is highly differentiated and delivers superior targeting and performance,” Steve Bird, General Partner at Focus Ventures comments. “Turn is in the perfect position to capitalize on the growth in performance-based online advertising, and we’re excited to be a part of their continued success.”
Jeff Crowe, General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners adds, “We believe that Turn is revolutionizing the online advertising industry. By combining its advanced technology platform with an auction marketplace for quality advertisers and publishers, Turn has found the secret sauce for explosive growth. As more advertisers focus on performance and measuring engagement, Turn is well-positioned to take advantage of advertising dollars shifting online.”
Bird will serve as an observer on Turn’s Board of Directors which also includes Turn’s CEO Jim Barnett; Jeff Crowe of Norwest Venture Partners; Bill Demas, former SVP and GM of the Yahoo Publisher Network Group; and John Moragne, co-founder and Managing Director at Trident Capital. Tod Francis, co-founder and Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, is also a board observer.
About Turn Inc.
Turn is the world’s first Smart Market for online advertising. Employing revolutionary machine learning technology, the Turn Smart Market combines automatic targeting and goal-driven pricing to optimize ROI for over 500 premium advertisers and maximize revenue for more than 3,000 high-quality publisher websites. Turn is located in Redwood City, California. For more information, visit http://www.turn.com.
About Focus Ventures
Focus Ventures is a top-performing venture capital firm that invests in expansion-stage leaders in the software, semiconductor and communications industries. The firm currently manages $830 million, having closed its first fund in October 1997, Focus Ventures II in December 1999 and Focus Ventures III in March 2006. Focus Ventures offers its portfolio companies access to high quality partners in Asia and an extensive network of resources focused specifically on driving top-line revenue growth through customer introductions and by establishing distribution channels, joint ventures and licensing arrangements. Since the firm’s inception, Focus Ventures has invested in over 100 companies and has had 26 IPOs and 19 acquisitions by public companies. A select number of portfolio companies that have gone public include: Active Software, Agile Software, Alteon WebSystems, Aruba Networks, Commerce One, Copper Mountain, Corio, Interwoven, Isilon Systems, Loudcloud, Niku, Pixelworks, ShoreTel, Starent Networks and Verisity.
