• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 30, 2009

FreeWheel, whose Monetization Rights Management platform helps content owners and distributors to sell ad inventory, on Thursday is expected to announce the closing of its Series-C round of financing worth $12 million.

Led by Foundation Capital and existing investor Battery Ventures, the investment will be used to support the company's infrastructure and continued growth.

San Mateo, Calif.-based FreeWheel was founded early last year by three DoubleClick alums and digital media veterans. The company offers content owners, carriers, and distributors end-to-end video ad management technology, which attempts to simplify the task of managing video ad sales, ad serving, and ad sales rights across widely syndicated distribution channels.

"We're enabling the development of the digital video ecosystem as it crosses the threshold from nascent opportunity to multibillion-dollar market," said Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel.

In the course of about a year, the company has signed more than 15 content providers, added 15 ad networks and distribution partners, and grown to 70 employees in San Mateo, New York and Beijing.

Last month, for instance, FreeWheel established a partnership with Attributor Corp., a provider of content monitoring and monetization platforms. The alliance created a mechanism by which content owners and distributors can identify and monetize their user-generated video content.

Attributor delivers content identification and automated policy infrastructure that scales Web-wide for content owners. FreeWheel selects high-yielding packages of ads from the sales forces and ad networks it knows are allowed to sell into a given piece of Attributor-identified content.