Mobile ad company Smaato raises $4.5M

Smaato, a company that helps mobile publishers optimize their ads, has raised $4.5 million in a second round of funding.

The company isn’t a  mobile ad network, but rather allows publishers to pull the most valuable ads for their websites and apps from multiple other networks. Chief executive and co-founder Ragnar Kruse said Smaato is particularly popular among publishers who are trying to reach an international audience. Delivering advertising overseas involves big challenges, such as serving ads without long-distance delays. Smaato serves those ads from a local network over there.

Als0, individual networks often have trouble selling enough ads to fill a publisher’s inventory, which means they’re left “leaving money on the table,” Kruse said. “That is where our add-value really kicks in,” he added. “Having several ad networks, we can overcome technical issues, we can overcome latencies, and so on.”

The last year has been a period of rapid growth for Smaato, headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif. It went from serving 100 publishers to 1,000, and Kruse said the company served 3 billion ad requests in November. Smaato is available in more than 215 companies and pulls advertising from 33 ad networks.

The funding was led by Aeris Capital, which also participated in the $3.5 million Smaato raised in January 2008. Although this is technically Smaato’s second round, Kruse told me thinks of it as the company’s first real institutional funding.

And the competiton? Adwhirl, another company that aggregates ad networks for publishers, was recently acquired by Admob, which is in turn being acquired by Google.