Most peo­ple with media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies would con­cede that a mobile ad start­up which raised $1.25 mil­lion in seed fund­ing at the start of the year — only to raise a fur­ther $10.5 mil­lion in Series A just eleven months lat­er — is seri­ous­ly on the rise. And that would be a fair appraisal of New York-based mobile ad retar­get­ing com­pa­ny Tap­Com­merce, which has just bagged that prince­ly lit­tle sum cour­tesy of a round led by RRE Ven­tures and Bain Cap­i­tal Ventures.

Illus­tri­ous clients

Mobile adver­tis­ing afi­ciona­dos may well be curi­ous about what, exact­ly, has inspired such investor con­fi­dence in the fledg­ling company.

TapCommerce’s pièce de résis­tance is mobile ad retar­get­ing, where busi­ness­es can tar­get their ads to users based on their pre­vi­ous activ­i­ty. There are risks attached to this, how­ev­er; han­dled well, it pro­vides users with rel­e­vant ads. Han­dled bad­ly, it gets irri­tat­ing (and just a lit­tle bit creepy).

But Tap­Com­merce seems to be get­ting it right. This week, CEO Bri­an Long told TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Antho­ny Ha that more than 50 cus­tomers are now using Tap­Com­merce – includ­ing 30 of the top 100 most suc­cess­ful apps.

Ecom­merce com­pa­nies espe­cial­ly seem to like retar­get­ing as a strat­e­gy. It’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing then that TapCommerce’s can boast cus­tomers includ­ing eBay, Fab and Jackthreads.

Answer­ing key ques­tions about mobile adver­tis­ing

While the spend on mobile adver­tis­ing is def­i­nite­ly on the up and up, Long says that com­pa­nies are begin­ning to want answers to some press­ing ques­tions. As he puts it:

“Our major the­sis is that at some point, all of these com­pa­nies are going to say, ‘Okay we got the installs, we just spent $3 mil­lion, what’s hap­pen­ing now? How are we mak­ing mon­ey on these people?’”

That’s where TapComcerce’s tech­nol­o­gy comes in and, despite some emerg­ing com­pe­ti­tion, its robust enough to be prac­ti­cal­ly unri­valled in the mar­ket­place. It’s capa­ble, Long says, of suck­ing in “very large amounts of data cou­pled with sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­ti­cal analysis.”

Some of the new mon­ey will be chan­nelled into devel­op­ing this plat­form; after all, just because some­thing is good doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improve­ment and inno­va­tion. But, as Long explains, the big invest­ment is a wel­come one main­ly because, “part of this is going to be a land grab, just as it was on the web.”