Any prod­uct man­ag­er who knows about ad tech firms will have heard that stock val­ues nose-dived late last year dur­ing a tur­bu­lent IPO sea­son; but New York’s ad tech star Media­Math still man­aged to retain investor con­fi­dence this year and has just suc­cess­ful­ly closed a mas­sive Series C round worth $73.5 mil­lion. It also raised its debt to $105 mil­lion. That means the total raised amount­ed to a thun­der­ing $178.5 mil­lion, dwarf­ing the $14 mil­lion Series B it raised in 2011.

Glob­al Expan­sion 

Busi­ness savvy prod­uct man­agers might rea­son­ably sur­mise that MediaMath’s prime investor (the round was led by Spring Lake Equi­ty Part­ners) thinks its prod­uct offer­ings are a good few cuts above the com­pe­ti­tion, but it’s equal­ly like­ly that investors, who still seem con­fi­dent about pour­ing cash into ad tech firms, are in this case post­pon­ing an IPO until the stock mar­ket regains its bal­ance after last year’s volatility.

What­ev­er the rea­son­ing, Media­Math is clear about what it intends to do with the raise. Glob­al expan­sion is in its sights, and it plans to sup­port new offices in the APAC, EMEA and Latin Amer­i­can mar­kets. But that’s not all: it’s also plan­ning to chan­nel some of the mon­ey into prod­uct devel­op­ment, sig­nif­i­cant­ly enhanc­ing its flag­ship Ter­mi­nalOne Mar­ket­ing Oper­at­ing System.

Embrac­ing mobile

For those prod­uct man­agers who don’t have a clue what this tech­nol­o­gy does, it basi­cal­ly allows ad buy­ers to dis­trib­ute their cash across mul­ti­ple audi­ence seg­ments and media prop­er­ties, where­upon it auto­mat­i­cal­ly allo­cates a bud­get to the place­ments that per­form the best.

Found­ed in 2007 at the height of the desk­top era, Media­Math has since been steadi­ly adapt­ing its busi­ness to meet the require­ments of an increas­ing­ly mobile world. The company’s Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer, Ari Buchal­ter, told AdAge in April that mobile now makes up between ten and twen­ty per­cent of MediaMath’s busi­ness. And it’s clear that it’s seri­ous about cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the boom in mobile con­sump­tion; it’s will­ing to spend to con­sol­i­date its mobile posi­tion, hav­ing bought the cook­ie-free, cross-device tar­get­ing tech firm Tac­tads in April this year.

Com­ment­ing on the Series D round, Spring Lake equi­ty Part­ner spokesman Dan Mack­eigan said:

We have been look­ing to back a leader in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing space for quite some time. We are excit­ed to sup­port the com­pa­ny through this next phase of growth.”