Independent mobile advertising network Millennial Media has raised an additional $27.5 million in equity funding that will be used to fund an acceleration of the company?s 2011 global growth plan after tripling its revenues in 2010.

Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures and New Enterprise Associates participated in the funding round. This new investment brings the company?s equity funding to more than $65 million.

?The company has achieved profitable results?the funding is about not needing money to run the business, but rather it will fund an aggressive expansion plan to build on our profitable model,? said Paul Palmieri, president/CEO of Millennial Media, Baltimore. ?With mobile becoming the center of digital content and advertising, Millennial is well positioned to thrive in the mobile advertising space.

?We will be expanding internationally in 2011 to Asia-Pacific,? he said. ?This funding also presents an opportunity for us to be acquisitive, to make some strategic acquisitions to help us in our desire to expand.?

Headquartered in Baltimore, Millennial Media also has offices in New York, London and San Francisco, with sales offices in Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

Roadmap for growth
Millennial Media plans to use the growth investment in part to build on its 2010 acquisition of TapMetrics, a mobile analytics company, with additional acquisitions in 2011.

Additional investments will be made in the company?s international and platform lines of business.
Asia-Pacific is a particular area of focus for expanding its mobile ad network internationally.

Millennial Media has achieved profitable results and has exceeded its revenue and EBITDA projections for ten consecutive quarters, according to NEA.

Mr. Palmieri said that the mobile model continues to expand beyond the phone, and is becoming the new, device-based Internet via applications on everything from refrigerators to tablets to televisions.

Launched more than four years ago, Millennial Media claims that its U.S. mobile ad network business reaches more than 85 percent of U.S. mobile Web users and serves more than 17 billion mobile ad impressions each month.

Millennial Media?s global operations reach mobile consumers in more than 250 countries.

Additionally, the company?s technology platform powers mobile advertising programs operated by its partners, including media companies, handset manufacturers and mobile application developers.

Mr. Palmieri said that 2010 was a really important year for a number of reasons.

No. 1, the iPad and tablet devices are mobile devices funded by mobile advertising as publishers made a determination that the sites and applications deployed to those devices are uniquely mobile.

No. 2, the market really spoke in the back half of the year that cross-platform is really important.

?It is important for advertisers to support all platforms, because their target audience may not have decided on a single platform, and that certainly applies to developers as well,? Mr. Palmieri said. ?They needed to put their resources chiefly behind building great apps.

?We?re able to leverage our tools to drive monetization and revenue across different platforms while being able to see how they are making money across all of the SDKs they?ve been working with across Millennial?s developer system,? he said.

?It is important for developers to enable targeting and to get scale through multiple platforms without having to focus on one platform or another.?

Final Take

Carrie Seifer, vice president of sales at Millennial Media

/>/>