Mobile adver­tis­ing start­up Cel­tra, which offers ad dis­play tech­nol­o­gy and ana­lyt­ics, has just bagged anoth­er $4 mil­lion in invest­ment, just two years after secur­ing a $5 mil­lion Series A round back in Jan­u­ary 2011.

The cur­rent round was led by Soft­Bank Cap­i­tal, whose man­ag­ing part­ner Ron Fish­er will now join the startup’s board. Exist­ing investors Fairhaven Cap­i­tal and Grand­Banks Cap­i­tal also con­tributed to the new investment.

Cre­at­ing ads with­out coding

In June, Cel­tra launched the third ver­sion of its unique “AdCre­ator” tool, a self-ser­vice mobile phones adver­tis­ing plat­form.  AdCre­ator 3 rep­re­sent­ed a major over­haul of the prod­uct and includ­ed new archi­tec­ture and over 70 new fea­tures.  It allows mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies to cre­ate ads on mul­ti­ple mobile plat­forms with­out fuss­ing away over cod­ing, and enables dif­fer­ent teams to col­lab­o­rate on an ad.  Adver­tis­ers can use it to incor­po­rate fea­tures like Foursquare check-ins or Insta­gram pho­tos in an ad.

And it’s clear­ly pay­ing off. By the end of 2012, the com­pa­ny had seen rev­enue grow by 300 per cent on the same time in 2011, and it entered prof­itabil­i­ty in the third quar­ter of the year. That’s not at all bad for a firm that only came into the world in 2006.  It’s also received acco­lades from some pres­ti­gious sources, includ­ing Clark Koci­ch, the Chair­man of Razor­fish. Cel­tra, he said, is “con­stant­ly inno­vat­ing and push­ing the indus­try for­ward” and, as a result, is “expe­ri­enc­ing rapid adop­tion by adver­tis­ing agencies”.

From small fry to big fish

SoftBank’s Ron Fish­er said: “2012 was a water­shed year for mobile adver­tis­ing, and Celtra’s tech­nol­o­gy estab­lished the com­pa­ny as the uncon­test­ed leader in the rich media ad-serv­ing space.”

Celtra’s co-founder and CEO was clear­ly jubi­lant about the new invest­ment. He said:

“We are thrilled about this strate­gic invest­ment from Soft­Bank Cap­i­tal. It comes at a piv­otal time for the com­pa­ny as we look to expand our foot­print domes­ti­cal­ly and abroad. I am con­fi­dent Soft­Bank Capital’s involve­ment will have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on our busi­ness as we enter into our next phase of growth.”

The firm plans to use the new fund­ing to open up new oppor­tu­ni­ties in Japan and Asia more gen­er­al­ly, as well as to bring prod­uct devel­op­ment process­es to San Francisco.