Verve Wireless, which provides a technology platform to traditional media companies for mobile advertising, has been on a tear in recent weeks—raising additional capital, filling out its management team, and recruiting five digital media leaders for its board of advisors.
In a recent regulatory filing, Verve disclosed that it has raised $3.5 million of a planned $6 million from investors. The filing did not identify the investors and Verve’s Greg Hallinan didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail query this morning. When I profiled Verve in October, the six-year-old startup based in Encinitas, CA, and Bethesda, MD, had raised a total of $12 million in from investors that included BlueRun Ventures and the Associated Press.
In an announcement today, Verve says it has hired Dan Hodges, the former head of global sales at the Associated Press, to oversee national advertising sales as Verve’s chief revenue officer, and former AOL vice president Aimee Irwin to manage the Verve publisher network.
Earlier this year, the company hired former ExtendMedia chief Tom MacIsaac as CEO and acquired Deconstruct Media, a Washington D.C. mobile advertising technology company.
The company also recently announced that it had recruited former Aegis Media CEO Sarah Fay, TidalTV CEO Scott Ferber, Mediabrands Velociter CEO Tim Hanlon, Engine USA CEO Martin Puris, and former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt to serve on its advisory board.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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