Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Google Ventures Bets on Mobile Ad Startup YieldMo

Google dominates mobile ads, but it doesn’t own all of the market. So it is investing in a startup that wants to carve out its own niche: Google Ventures has led an $8 million round in YieldMo, a company that runs a private ad exchange for mobile publishers.

The New York-based company is run by Michael Yavonditte, who is best known for building Quigo and selling that ad company to AOL in 2007. More recently he took a stab at building a financial news database with Tracked.com, and then pivoted that into Hashable, an unsuccessful attempt to build a professional social network.

Like other mobile ad startups, YieldMo places ads both on mobile Web pages and within apps. Unlike others, YieldMo doesn’t work with traditional banner ads, but sells what it describes as “proprietary, consumer-friendly ad formats.”

YieldMo has now raised $12.1 million to date. Previous investors Union Square Ventures, Genacast, Rhodium and Dace Ventures came back for this round.

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First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

— Parker Higgins via Twitter