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Mojiva exec discusses $7M funding, state of the industry

Mojiva Inc., which runs a mobile advertising network and the independent mobile ad-serving and analytics platform mOcean Mobile, has closed a $7 million second round of venture funding.

The B round was led by UV Partners and includes existing investors Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, the venture capital arm of the international media company Bertelsmann. In its first round in 2008, Mojiva raised $3 million, primarily from Bertelsmann.

Mobile Marketer?s Dan Butcher interviewed Dave Gwozdz, CEO of Mojiva, New York. Here is what he had to say:

How will the new funding be invested? Will it be invested in both Mojiva and mOcean?
The funds primarily will help respond to the demand in terms of staffing sales and sales support domestically for both Mojiva and mOcean Mobile. It will also be used to expand into several international markets where we have growing customer bases.
 
What is Mojiva and mOcean?s growth strategy going forward?
Mojiva will expand the premium ad network, giving advertisers access to some of the top publisher content.

Currently serving over 41 million unique users, we see expanded opportunities to grow that number in both the mobile Web and all app environments?iPhone, Android, etcetera.

We were the first to announce support for iPad and we will continue to expand our rich-media offerings into the larger-format devices.

MOcean will continue to provide the most comprehensive mobile ad campaign management, inventory forecasting and optimization tools.

In addition, we have developed some unique business level analytics, which will really allow publishers to manage the big picture and make decisions based on insightful data into where their content is producing the most value to them and to the advertiser.

Lastly, and probably most exciting, is that we have seen a huge surge in new ad networks entering the mobile space.

MOcean is the only ready-to-go ad-serving platform that can quickly allow new or existing online ad networks to enter the mobile space and generate instant revenue for their publishers and give an instant ad solution to their advertisers.

MOcean Mobile now powers several mobile ad networks all over the globe?in fact, no one else currently has this white-label capability, so we will put our new capital to work to organize around this opportunity in a major way as we envision dozens, if not hundreds, of ad networks entering the space as they have in the online world.

What is the current state of mobile advertising? Have you noticed increased brand spend?
It is looking quite good actually. More ad dollars are flowing in, from more brands.

There had really been a fundamental void in intelligent platform technology, which had clearly stymied the flow of ad dollars into mobile.

Many brands just weren?t comfortable spending and publishers had no clarity in what expanding their mobile Web site or building apps would give then in terms of return from ad dollars.

The intelligence that mOcean Mobile brings to the market for both buyers and sellers is raising the bar for everyone and will help accelerate this growth as brand can now be more intelligent about how mobile ad spending is measured in terms of conversions, ROI, etcetera.

And, publishers have a clean window into how to monetize their content.