AdMob gains 9m funding boost to aid expansion

AdMob, the mobile advertising company, is set to increase its sales and marketing force in the UK and US, after securing £9m investment from Sequoia Capital’s Growth Fund.

The company, which serves 4.5 billion targeted and personalised ads across the mobile internet each month, is looking to extend its lead in mobile advertising by boosting its staff numbers in its two key markets.

It will also accelerate its global growth by hiring local staff in key markets and adding new language interfaces, with an emphasis in Western Europe, India, South Africa and Japan.

Omar Hamoui, chief executive of AdMob, says: “We want to continue to grow the mobile advertising market and AdMob’s clear advantage in it by investing in the technology, operations.”

AdMob currently works with a global publisher network that includes over 6,000 partners.

The company says it is has seen a steep increase in brands seeking mobile ads since the introduction of the iPhone, and brands now using the platform include Toshiba and Comedy Central.

AdMob will increase investment in the company’s mobile technology platform, including its targeting, optimisation and ad serving algorithms, in a bid to expand the breadth of offerings for publishers and advertisers.

Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which also funded Google and Apple when they were starting, says: “AdMob has tapped into the exploding market of publishers creating great mobile content for consumers and the advertisers eager to interact with those engaged users. They have some of the same qualities that we saw in Google, Yahoo!, YouTube and Apple.”