Nexage has raised $4 million in a first round of capital to build a mobile advertising platform, which promises to fix one of the biggest sticking points in mobile: bringing together the various ad types, including mobile web, SMS, in-game and video advertising into one addressable market. Investors in the round include BlackBerry Partners Fund and GrandBanks Capital. In total, the company has raised $6.5 million. The funding was first reported in a document filed with the SEC, but Nexage’s CEO Devkumar Gandhi confirmed in an interview.
In addition to raising the money, the seven-person company is also moving its headquarters to Boston from Fremont, Calif. to be close to mobile advertising talent pool (which includes companies, such as Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Interactive, JumpTap, Quattro Wireless and AOL’s Third Screen Media). It also announced that it is appointing Mike Baker to chairman of the board. Formerly, Baker was a VP at Nokia Interactive, which was formed after it bought Enpocket, where he was CEO.
In the past year or so, the company has tweaked its focus from building a platform to distribute rich media in mobile, such as video, to building a platform to monetize mobile content. One of its early customers on the content side was CBS (NYSE: CBS), and now on the mobile advertising side, Gandhi said customers include *iLoop Mobile* and Publishers Clearing House. Ghandi: “In Feb., we commercially deployed our AdMax platform, and over the last six months, we have seen our entire growth coming from it.”
He said their platform will convert an ad on the fly to any format, including video, audio, in-game advertising and SMS. The company aggregates more than 24 mobile ad networks globally to create a large inventory. It does not have a direct sales force.
Ghandi says one opportunity he sees going forward in mobile is help open up the app stores to advertisers by working with the storefront owners, like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), Nokia or Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Right now, it’s a pretty cumbersome process for application developers to use advertising to monetize their applications because often times they are locked into using one ad network at a time. “We want to open up mobile advertising by not locking them into a particular ad network.”

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