Smaato has closed a $7 million round of funding, which is meant to help fuel and extend the company?s presence in Asia.

Singapore?s EDBI venture capitalist firm led the $7 million round, with participation from existing shareholders.

Mobile Marketer?s Dan Butcher interviewed Harald Nedhardt, chief marketing officer and cofounder of Smaato, Hamburg, Germany. Here is what he had to say in regards to the new funding:

How will Smaato?s new funding be invested?
Smaato will use the proceeds of this recent funding round to increase the momentum of our technical lead in mobile advertising optimization as well as hiring new staff.

Smaato started with our headquarters in San Francisco and an office in Hamburg, Germany.

In order to now cover 24/5 hours of support for our partners, we are looking to expand the Smaato staff with 30 more open positions ? especially in Singapore.

What is Smaato?s roadmap for growth?
Smaato is focusing on adding more services and product features to our SOMA optimization platform for mobile advertising.

This will include more support for real-time bidding, rich media and enhanced reporting and analytics.

As recently announced though our partnership with AppAnnie, more companies will be using Smaato?s open API and SDKs to enhance the functionality of their platforms.

We started with this 15 months ago with a self-service portal for mobile publishers and app developers.

In 2010, we could grow the numbers of publishers and app developers who signed up with Smaato from around 1,000 to more than 11,000.

To handle all these partners and the traffic of the 20 billion-plus managed ad requests they are producing every day, our system works fully automated from the sign-up throughout the whole integration process. 

What is the current state of mobile advertising?
Smaato is excited that the mobile advertising ecosystem is growing and innovating with more rich-media experiences and better targeting ? especially in the geolocation services and location-based targeting.

With the help of the Mobile Marketing Association, the industry is driving forward global standards and coming from an education cycle into a stage where mobile becomes weaved into marketing budgets of global brands as its own line item.

We have seen an enormous growth throughout the last year and published some relevant data in whitepapers together with mobileSquared. It showed that the most important region is still Asia, with Japan as the only country, that made more than $1 billion revenue in mobile advertising in 2010.

In total the mobile ad spend in 2010 was about $11 billion worldwide and is expected to grow up to $20 billion this year.

What trends to you expect to see over the course of 2011?
We see mobile advertising to continue to grab in significant budget increase and better creative experiences and branded services.

There will be more products that will include new and innovative formats (like augmented reality as a form of rich media) to push the envelope.

Mobile advertising will continue growing in all regions. The U.S .market is predicted to bypass the $1 billion revenue this year.