Lot18, the New York-based company that is changing the way Americans buy wine and gourmet food, today announced that it has completed a $30 million Series C financing led by Accel Partners. Sameer Gandhi, who led Accel's investments in Bonobos, Spotify and StumbleUpon, will join Lot18's board of directors. Lot18's earlier backers, New Enterprise Associates and FirstMark Capital, are also contributing to the new round of financing. The funds will support continued growth, as well as further technological and product development, particularly the expansion of Lot18 Gourmet and Experiences, the company's food and travel verticals, respectively.
Lot18 was founded in 2010 by Kevin Fortuna and Philip James. Fortuna was formerly the CEO of Quigo, an advertising technology company that was sold to AOL Time Warner for $360 million in November 2007. James was the Founder and CEO of Snooth, the world's largest wine website.
Lot18 connects its members with exclusive, limited-time opportunities to purchase directly from wineries, gourmet-food producers and other makers of artisanal goods. Each product or experience featured on Lot18 is individually evaluated for quality by Lot18's team of experts. Lot18 is headquartered in New York.
OpenX, Ad Server for Web Publishing, Raises $10 million Series C funding from DAG, Accel, Index. Other investors included Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and Jonathan Miller. The Company raised $5 million in its Series A financing, which closed in May 2007 and raised $15.5 million in its Series B financing, which closed in December 2007.
OpenX is a leading ad server for web publishers offering publishers comprehensive, customizable and free to use ad serving technology.
OpenX Ad Server empowers a community of more than 150,000 websites across the Internet with the ability to take control of their ads and maximize their ad revenue and relevance.
OpenX Ad Server products are translated into 25 languages, used in more than 100 countries around the world, and serve more than 300 billion ads each month.
OpenX Market is the company's unique monetization platform and is designed to help publishers maximize the price of their inventory and to help advertisers much more effectively target where their ads are served.
The Market uses a real-time auction marketplace in which multiple classes of buyers bid for each impression provided by OpenX's vast publisher base.
"OpenX is demonstrating that combining a unique business model with a widely adopted open source product can provide the basis for a company of significant scale," said Nick Pianim, managing director, DAG Ventures. "We think that the 300 billion impressions which flow through the company's software monthly will allow the company to rapidly grow the Market, creating enormous value for everyone in the OpenX ecosystem in the process. Moreover, the broad, worldwide use of the company’s products and services demonstrates that there is a clear need for an independent alternative technology platform in the online advertising space and OpenX is poised to take full advantage of that need."
