PubMatic Raises $13 Million From Nokia Growth Partners

A few days after the Rubicon Project filed for an IPO, one of its competitors in the race to build fast-growing programmatic advertising platforms, PubMatic, said it had raised $13 million in new funding.

The lead investor in the new round for the Redwood City, Calif., startup is Nokia Growth Partners. NGP’s John Gardner will join PubMatic’s board as an observer.

It was joined by current investors, including August Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Helion Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. With the new investment, PubMatic has raised a total of $76 million; it has declined to state its valuation with the new funding.

In an interview, PubMatic CEO and co-founder Rajeev Goel said that the company had been growing internationally in 2013 and would use the money for that, as well as to continue to improve its platform.

“The globalization of real-time bidding has taken place,” said Goel. “But it has to be cross-platform and work as a single platform across mobile and video and whatever devices consumers are using.”

The business of real-time bidding and programmatic advertising is becoming a key part of the ecosystem as publishers seek to make up for the decline in the more traditional display advertising market with growth in mobile and video advertising.

This cross-screen and multi-device strategy is aimed at reducing friction for publishers who are seeking buyers of ads across an increasingly complex landscape. PubMatic’s customers are varied, from eBay to AccuWeather to Advance Digital, and across the world.

It will be interesting to see where all this independent ad tech and data activity — besides Rubicon, other PubMatic rivals include Turn and AppNexus, all of which are battling for business with giant Google — will end up. PubMatic has had acquisition talks with Yahoo in the past, for example. Another NGP investment, Rocket Fuel, went public, while MoPub — not NPG’s — was sold to Twitter for $350 million in stock.

In other words, more to come.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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