Extreme Reach Raises $9M More to Improve Distribution and Tracking of Video Ads

Score one for digital video advertising. Extreme Reach, a Needham, MA-based maker of distribution software for video ads, said yesterday it has closed $9 million in Series B financing, made up of $7 million in equity and $2 million in term debt. The round was led by one of the company’s original investors, Village Ventures. Existing investors Greycroft Partners and Long River Ventures also participated in the round.

Extreme Reach is trying to help video advertisers and ad agencies more effectively distribute their ads to cable networks, TV stations, Web publishers, and mobile-device publishers. One basic problem is that managing all the different kinds of video files, in all their various formats, gets tricky fast. What Extreme Reach does is provide software as a service to help advertisers deliver and track their video ad campaigns across all the different kinds of media.

The company’s senior management team comes from FastChannel Network, an early leader in video ad distribution, which was acquired by Irving, TX-based DG Systems back in 2006. One advantage Extreme Reach has over FastChannel (now called DG FastChannel) is that it makes use of cloud-computing resources and the declining costs of Internet bandwidth. More specifically, the company uses cloud-based data storage and processing power from Amazon Web Services and Nirvanix to store and serve companies’ video ads. That means it doesn’t need its own data center or require its customers to have specialized hardware.

Investor Ian Sigalow, from Greycroft Partners, said in a statement that Extreme Reach “has won a number of Fortune 500 accounts, including five of the largest advertisers in the U.S.,” and that the new money “will enable the company to accelerate and build on that momentum.”

Extreme Reach was founded in 2008 and came out of stealth mode in January 2009. Last August, CEO John Roland told Xconomy that the company had raised $6 million up to that point. The plan at the time was to expand the staff to 50 or more over the course of six to 12 months. It seems safe to say that, with the new funding, the company will be looking to expand its customer base—and the reach of digital video advertising—even further.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.