Media6 Degrees Will Use $10 Million Funding to Expand Staff
Behavioral targeting firm will use money from Venrock to expand its sales, client services and business development teams.
Media6 Degrees, a behavioral targeting firm that helps marketers connect with consumer segments by tracking their use of the social graph, has closed $9.8 million in Series A funding from venture capital firm Venrock and U.S. Venture Partners.
Media6, which is based in New York, will use the money almost exclusively to hire new staff to meet customer demand, said Joe Doran, Media6 CEO and former Microsoft advertising executive.
“We want to grow a lot faster than we had planned originally, and this allows us to fuel our expansion,” he said. The company will celebrate its one-year anniversary in May.
“We have 25 people on staff now, which is a good size team for our startup, and we are going to expand our sales, client services and business development teams,” Doran said. He also ruled out the possibility that Media6 would seek to make any acquisitions or otherwise expand in any way that wasn’t organic.
Media6 offers advertisers a way to follow and connect with consumers by tracking their activities on social networks. The company uses a combination of cookies and ad server logs to pinpoint a person’s interests and generate anonymous profiles of the friends he or she interacts with most often.
Venrock and U.S. Venture Partners join Coriolis Ventures, among others, as financial backers of Media6. The company has also helped fund DoubleClick, Apple and Adify.
In a written statement, David Pakman, a partner at Venrock, praised Media6 for being ” the first company to help advertisers take advantage of the explosive growth of social media in a way that works for both marketers and audiences.”
Doran declined to name clients Media6 was currently working for, but said it was active in all the key verticals, including consumer retail, financial services and telecom.
