• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 15, 2010

The founders of ad-serving technology firm Accipiter on Monday unveiled their latest project: an ad-serving and monitoring platform for publishers' premium inventory named aiMatch.

In late 2006, Accipiter was sold to aQuantive's technologies business unit, Atlas, for $30.3 million in cash. Less than six months later, Microsoft scooped up aQuantive for a cool $6 billion.

Following a brief hiatus, three of Accipiter's founders -- Jeff Wood, Guy Taylor, and Ryan Treichler -- have built a platform to address what they feel is an underserved market.

"When we got together a year ago, most of what we saw was innovation around the second-tier or remnant channel for publishers," said Wood, who is serving as aiMatch's chief executive.

"We said this would be a great time to innovate for publishers and their premium inventory directly," added Wood, who spent about a year as VP of publisher sales at Microsoft Advertising, before leaving to spend some time with his family.

AiMatch on Monday also announced its limited availability for "early adopters," and said it expects to platform to become broadly available by June.

On the premise that premium, guaranteed inventory is a publisher's primary online advertising asset, the startup aims to handle business intelligence, forecasting, simulation and ad delivery for publishers.

The "ai" in aiMatch stands for "artificial intelligence," and connotes the consumer and campaign insights that it will afford publishers.

"We're providing one system that does delivery and market forecasting at the same time," said Wood. "And beyond just forecasting, publishers want to do modeling and see how these things would affect revenue -- we can do that."

Based on positive discussions with various publishers "around the world," Wood said he expected to announce launch partners in the next 30 to 60 days.

With an eye on international markets, aiMatch has also tapped Steve Perks, former head of publisher dolutions EMEA for Microsoft Advertising, to lead the startup's efforts abroad.