Stealthy Online Ad Startup Dataxu Raises $6 Million
Dataxu, an online advertising startup run by former Enpocket and Nokia Interactive chief Michael Baker, has raised just over $6 million in first-round funding, according to a regulatory filing. Backers include Atlas Venture and Flybridge Capital Partners, with Jeff Fagnan (Atlas) and Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge and prolific peHUB contributor) joining the company’s board of directors.
Dataxu (pronounced data-zoo) was founded in 2007 by MIT professor Ed Crawley. Its first CEO was Bruce Journey, who had spent the prior decade as publisher of the MIT Technology Review. It’s not exactly clear when he turned the reins over to Baker, as their LinkedIn profiles have conflicting dates (Journey claims to have been CEO though last month, while Baker’s says he took over in September 2008). I tried leaving a voicemail for Baker, but was instead (repeatedly) directed to Journey’s recording. Moving on…
There isn’t too much info yet available on the company, but here is what its sparse website says:
DataXu is a cutting-edge Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company formed by MIT alums and professionals. Our product will cause the next revolution in Internet advertising by disrupting how advertising is bought and sold on the Internet. Our proprietary technology is a high-performance real-time, automated, self-learning decision-support system that matches advertisers, publishers, and web users at a rate of hundreds of thousands of requests per second.
A Flybridge spokeswoman declined to provide more details, saying that the company is sticking to its stealthiness for the time being.
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