Advertising-analytics startup Metamarkets picks up $15M

Metamarkets, a startup with increasingly popular programmatic advertising analytics software for ad exchanges, ad sellers, and ad buyers, has taken on $15 million in new funding.

The startup has been rapidly increasing its revenue and customer count, and things are looking up again this year, Metamarkets cofounder and chief executive Mike Driscoll told VentureBeat in an interview.

Because Metamarkets offers different dashboards for different types of companies that deal with programmatic ads, the startup boasts a few categories of customers. The publisher list includes FT.com, while Smaato, Twitter, and Yahoo pop up on the ad exchange list, among others. When it comes to demand-side platforms — the ones that buy ads — Metamarkets now has Magnetic and Drawbridge.

With the new funding, the startup is in a better position to argue that businesses working with programmatic advertising should skip the trouble of loading, cleaning up, and visualizing data and simply subscribe to Metamarkets’ cloud-based service.

And that in itself is a distinctive characteristic, even as programmatic advertising becomes more common.

“Frankly, I don’t know that there’s anyone else that is delivering that entirely end to end the way we are,” Driscoll said.

A complex technological backbone underlies Metamarkets’ application. The service processes data as it becomes available, queries it with Metamarkets’ Druid open-source streaming data store, and then visualizes the results.

Last week Metamarkets announced that it was doing away with Druid’s GPL license and giving it a more permissive Apache license. The move should encourage more companies to build on top of the technology. To date companies like eBay, PayPal, Netflix, and Time Warner Cable have put Druid into production, Driscoll said.

San Francisco-based Metmarkets started in 2010 and now employs about 50 people. To date it has raised $43.5 million.

Data Collective led the new round in the startup. John Battelle, City National Bank, IA Ventures, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, and Village Ventures also participated.