isocket, an open ad platform, is announcing a Series A round of financing led by Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Also joining the round was David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, and Dave McClure of Founders Fund Angel. David Hirsch, a former head of Google advertising sales, invested from NYC-based Metamorphic Ventures. Steve Gurasich, the Co-Founder and CEO of Austin based ad agency GSD&M Idea City, invested along with additional Angels.
Additional investors include David Cohen of TechStars in Colorado, Quest Venture Partners, Accelerator Ventures, and Plug & Play / Amidzad.
isocket is an early stage startup in limited, invitation-only beta testing. It went live in May 2009 via a launch program with TechCrunch. The company has been pretty quiet about product details or plans outside of what’s available in their private beta. isocket does not charge a commission on in-network transactions, instead favoring flat monthly fees that are saving publishers an average of thousands of dollars per month over their competitors. John Ramey, Founder and CEO, says they are bringing the “principles of the open web to the historically closed ad market” via their platform and business model.
isocket plans on using this funding to expand their team and bring their platform to the public.
Congrats to these guys. Having been a user of the isocket platform I can tell you that it is really solid and ready to go for the big time.
Congrats to John & team — they have come a long way and iSocket is a great platform!
Congratulations John and Zak! Wish you all the success in the world!
Looking forward to using the platform on Shoutback very soon.
A big congratulations to John and the team at iSocket! It’s been a pleasure working with you and glad to see the site & logo still looking sharp — to continued success.
These guy’s are originally from my hometown (Bloomington, IN). Always happy to see the rest of the tech world continuing to recognize that they are the real deal!
Congrats John and Zak!
John is one of the smartest young entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. He’s confront a BIG challenge, but if anyone can pull it off it’s him.
But John, what’s with the “founded in the Midwest” baloney?? Fly the Bloomington flag proudly, my IU brother!
Congrats to John and the team at isocket!
DFJ reeeaaallllyyy needs a new logo.
This is an opportunity to use slang and acronyms I traditionally despise. Woot! Booyah! Ftw!
Well deserved and I am continuosly impressed with john’s persistence (and his height).
Best of luck.
Congratulations on the deal! isocket looks great and it will be exciting to see it go public!
The world does not need more advertising platforms and networks that delivery ads. We need more companies that actually create a REAL PRODUCT. Internet is becoming a space where company after company is created to pimp products created by others. Such lack of imagination. People with real brain and imagination create real products. How many ad networks and platforms do we need? and every time one of these companies launches – oh wow… second coming of Jesus. Give me a break. useless companies that do nothing to change lives of people. I remember once Jack Welch said real technology companies are companies like GE and not these air-filled internet companies whose sole goal is to create “eyeballs”. Useless. I know I know… the silicone valley crowd will be up in arms about my comments. Reality is that most start-up these days LACK IMAGINATION or real products… advertising! Such a hyped business.
My opinion differs Ron. The site I manage is going to change the way advertising on the web is sold and we are doing that with the help of iSocket.
I’m surrounded by friends with small businesses and when they talk about where their advertising dollars are going and how much ROI they are getting, it’s dismal. Most small business owners are too busy selling, managing employees, paying bills and ordering stock to take a class on google ad words, SEO and heck some of them haven’t even gotten around to starting websites.
Most small business owners don’t understand CPM or CPC (and they dont want to learn either, they just want to run their businesses) then there’s the question of reaching your area and creating art for the ad. These people want to reach their communities with online advertising, but it needs to be fast, convenient and affordable. With the help of the team at iSocket we will sell space on a tenancy basis on hyper local pages to small businesses in communities across the U.S. and those owners can buy their ads at 3 am (the normal hour for planning advertising if you own a bar or restaurant I’m told) and link those ads to their website.
This is an innovation and for those small business owners who want to reach the people who eat their pizza, come to get their hair cut or buy their buy their farm fresh veggies this is a real product.
Maybe if iSocket was a service you wanted to use or were excited about you would see the value more clearly.
The Metamorphic Ventures team is thrilled to be the NY VC on this syndicate. We wish John and team continued sucess and now its execution time.
congrats John and Zak!!!
You guys totally and absolutely rock the house.
@Ron
So what you are saying is that innovation within broadly defined existing spaces does not take imagination?
If it was up to people like you I’d be riding a horse to work and sending emails by pigeons.
typo: “John Ramey, Founder & CEO…”
should be “John Ramey, Chief Awkward Officer…”
(see http://twitter.com/jpramey)
congrats player
Congrats guys! Thrilled to see you pop up on TC today
what happened to the good old fashioned TC reader skepticism.. this is like a big circle jerk. (except for Ron above)
Good job leveraging the names of their early committed investors to get the latter ones.
Interesting. I really like the idea of giving smaller publishers the tools to slice/dice/price their inventory. That solves one very important part of their direct sales problem. They might also want to consider getting “Quantified” with Quantcast in order to prove their audience figures.
The next part of the problem is raising awareness among advertisers. Selling direct to agencies is a brutal, pound the pavement process that requires a huge investment in sales staff. Media planners simply don’t lean forward to search out new publishers (outside of a doing a quick comscore/nielsen run) – they lean back and wait for publishers to pitch them. Is isocket going to try to build buy-side liquidity? Maybe, but that would be an expensive, time-consuming proposition. IMHO, it will be difficult for the vast majority of publishers on isocket to get more than a trickle of dollars through the system.
Hey Clay – John here, Founder of isocket. You brought up an excellent point I wanted to respond to.
The number of advertising buyers is growing, while the size of those buyers is decreasing. More small/medium ad buyers are purchasing directly. Many sites, like TC, can attract lots of interest from buyers who don’t have an ad agency at all.
Think about a local SMB biz. They are used to picking up the phone, calling the radio station, and buying an ad directly. But now that those ad dollars are moving online, the behavior stays the same – the SMB wants to pick up the phone and buy an ad online.
I wrote about it on isocket: “Should I Try Direct Ad Sales On My Website?” http://blog.iso...-on-my-website/
Thoughts?
Is TC still using them and what’s the satisfaction of the product?
Well done.
Self serve ad platforms rock!
I’ve tried trafficspaces as well – a good competing service.