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Previous investors Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures also participated. The round brings Turn's total equity backing to over $37 million. The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup has developed a Web advertising technology based upon bevahioral targetting. Rather than focus on keywords, this kind of technology increases the effectiveness of ad campaigns by targetting advertising based upon users' Web browsing behavior. It's something that has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, but advertisers seem to be increasingly buying in to the technology as a way to very accurately put their wares in front of the appropriate eyeballs. Focus, which invested $6 million in this round, homed in on Turn after an introduction from Jeff Crowe at Norwest The big players in online advertising have left something of a gap for companies like Turn, Bird says. Google Inc. [GOOG] is more focused on keyword ad sales. Yahoo! Inc. [YHOO], through its acquisitions in 2007 of Right Media for $680 million and BlueLithium Inc. for $300 million, has targeted the behavioral ad market, but is distracted by integrating these companies, Bird says. "It seems they are trying to roll some of the pieces of the technology from those companies into their base platform, and in the process they are losing their identities," he says. "We talked to a number of customers and potential customers, and they like the specific focus of Turn." Bird says the technology is one thing that attracted Focus to the investment, but its performance was impressive too. The company, founded in 2005 by Jim Barnett (a former exec of Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo!), claims that since March 2008, it has climbed 11 positions to the number 16 slot in comScore's ad network rankings. Turn's monthly unique users climbed 100%, to 93 million, during the same period and it claimed 1.9 ad impressions, a 250% climb, by the end of July. "We and customers believe that Turn has a very substantial technological advantage in its algorithm and engine to automate the process of behavioral targeting," Bird says. Besides Yahoo!'s ad network deals, Google bought DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, and in July bought the contextual ad unit of Russia's Rambler Media Ltd. for $140 million. Microsoft Corp. [MSFT] bought aQuantive Inc. for $6 billion. It's been an active sector for big deals, Bird notes. "There are a variety of exit options, but given the history of this particular segment, larger players have been very acquisitive as innovative startups build good technology," he says. "There have been something like eight ad network purchase for big prices over the past 18 months." While this is good news for investors like Focus, Bird also notes that even the general lack of exit opportunities at the moment can also be a postive for later stage firms. "The path to liquidity is slowed down, but because we are later-stage investors, it creates more opportunities for us," he says. "Companies that might have been acquired or gone public need to raise more capital." If True's technology and traction is as good as Bird believes it is, his firm could be in a good position no matter what the market does. -- Olaf de Senerpont Domis See November 2006 story on Turn's Series B from TheDeal.com
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Online advertising platform Turn Inc. is set to announce today that it has raised a $15 million Series C led by Focus Ventures.
Venture Partners, says firm cofounder and general partner Steven Bird (pictured). Bird declines to give Turn's new valuation, but says the company got a "decent and fair step-up" from its 
