Independent mobile ad network InMobi has secured $8 million in its Series B funding round to further its global expansion with an emphasis on North America, Europe and Japan.

With this new round from its existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures, InMobi will focus on its recent United States expansion, launch in Japan and continue to grow existing operations in Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa. The company will also double its engineering staff to further enhance its mobile advertising technology platform worldwide.

?We are on a pretty major global expansion path,? said Anne Frisbie, vice president and North American managing director at InMobi, San Francisco. ?One of the ways we?ll be using the money is to invest in our newest expansions, the U.S., Europe and Japan.

?We?re definitely a dominant player in Asia and Africa, and we will have some expansions there, but a big portion of the funding will be focused on the newer areas,? she said. ?The other big use for the funding is going to be for research and development on the technology side.

?We?re continuing to make some pretty major investments in hiring engineering talent, as technology is a big differentiator for us, and we?ll continue to develop new features.?

InMobi, which claims that it doubled its network size quarter-over-quarter, provides advertisers, developers and publishers with a global mobile advertising platform.

The company has offices in London, San Francisco, Bangalore, Tokyo, Mumbai and Singapore.

VCs bullish on mobile advertising
This new round brings InMobi?s total funding to more than $15 million.

InMobi is positioning itself as a global mobile advertising alternative to Google and Apple for advertisers, developers and publishers.

The company claims its network totals 16.7 billion impressions monthly reaching 179 million consumers in 108 countries.

InMobi uses its analytics engine AdROIt to optimize ad serving in real time.

Its current list of brand clients includes Reebok, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Quaker Oats, Yamaha, Barclays and Yahoo.

The funding will be used to further product developments, including analytics designed to inform the ad-serving process in real-time, enhance ROI and help advertisers maintain a targeted buy at scale worldwide.

InMobi soft-launched in the U.S. in January and did quite a bit of new development on its platform to meet the new demands required in the U.S. and Europe, particularly on the smartphone side of the business to support in-application advertising via SDKs for iPhone, iPad and Android.

In addition, for the Japan launch, InMobi did quite a bit of development to launch its entire interface in Japanese and meet that market?s unique needs.

For example, in the feature phone market, InMobi cannot rely on pixel tracking, so the company does server-side tracking.

?We?re really focused on targeting and analytics, as well as direct insights into the advertisers? campaigns and application download tracking on the in-app side,? Ms. Frisbie said.

?We have a technology called Mobile Customer Discovery using targeting parameters from advertisers to give them insights as to where their customers are and optimize their campaigns based on back-end performance,? she said.

The funding is yet another sign that the mobile advertising ecosystem is growing by leaps and bounds.

?The growth of mobile advertising is just gigantic,? Ms. Frisbie said. ?For example, in the U.S. market place, we were at 500 million ad requests in January and we?re at 2 billion now.

?[Mobile ad requests for] North America have quadrupled over the course of the year,? she said.

Final take
Dan Butcher, Mobile Marketer

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