[November 16, 2009] Mobile ads firm Millennial Media gets $16M in new funding Tweet Nov 16, 2009 (The Baltimore Sun - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Baltimore-based Millennial Media, one of the country's largest advertising networks for mobile devices, said Monday that it raised $16 million in new funding that it will use to fuel its growth and international expansion. The $16 million in funding was part of a Series C round that was led by New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm with an office in Baltimore. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital and Charles River Ventures also participated. The news comes a week after Google Inc. paid $750 million in stock to acquire Millennial's top competitor, AdMob Inc. For many in the industry, including Millennial, Google's acquisition of AdMob was a sign that the mobile advertising market, though still small compared to online advertising, was going to become a bigger force in the future. Mobile ad spending will reach $416 million in 2009, compared with the nearly $24 billion that will be spent overall for online advertising, according to eMarketer, a digital media research firm. But the mobile ad market is expected to grow to more than triple, to $1.5 billion, in 2013, according to eMarketer. Millennial, which was launched in 2006 in Baltimore's Emerging Technology Center, has about 60 employees. The company claims it reaches 79 percent of the country's mobile Internet audience with the ads it serves. In a statement Monday morning, Millennial said it would use the new funding to scale up its operations, expand its presence in London, hire engineering and sales positions, and deploy new programs for its clients. To see more of The Baltimore Sun, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.baltimoresun.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Baltimore Sun Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]