Vantage Media raises $70M to help education publishers with search advertising
Vantage Media, a Venice, Calif. firm that helps publishers in the educational sector create ads that show up higher in search engine results, has raised $70 million in a frist round of venture capital.
The financing was led by Montgomery & Co. Also participating were Scale Venture Partners, Tudor Ventures and Integral Capital Partners.
The company named Steve Jillings chief executive officer, which was one reason investors supported the company, said Rory O’Driscoll, managing director with Scale. O’Driscoll told VentureBeat that Jillings is an execution specialist, and that this company was all about execution.
Vantage serves its customers by buying advertising spots beside the search results at Google, Yahoo and MSN. It does so by bidding on the keywords relevant to its education publishers. It then helps them create landing pages where users go after clicking on the ads.
Jillings was chief executive of Frontbridge Technologies, an email security company acquired by Microsoft Corporation in August 2005 for about $200 million. Scale’s O’Driscoll had invested in that company too.
Vantage manages more than 40 million keyword campaigns on the search engines, and they result in more than a billion impressions per year, the company said.
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