• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 24, 2009

AdMeld has closed an $8 million round of Series B funding, the ad optimization technology provider said Wednesday. Led by Spark Capital and Foundry Group, AdMeld plans to use the new funding to accelerate its sales and product development efforts.

Now, said AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett, "we can focus on solidifying our market leadership among premium publishers, evolving our core product, and completing development on some exciting new products for release in the Fall."

AdMeld is one among a growing number of startups competing to help Web publishers better manage the sea of ad networks they can now choose from to sell leftover ad impressions. For a share of earned ad revenue, companies like The Rubicon Project, Pubmatic, and AdMeld factor in pricing data, available inventory, and publisher guidelines to determine which ad network is sent an ad impression -- work that a publisher's sales force would otherwise be required to perform. Late last year, AdMeld launched a platform to help publishers maximize revenue from digital ad networks and ad exchanges.

The AdMeld platform, which is emerging from an eight-month beta program, attempts to leverage dynamic pricing and advanced targeting to better route inventory from publishers to generate higher revenue for each ad served. At the same time, AdMeld brought in Barrett, who had most recently served as EVP and chief revenue officer for News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media.

Currently more than 65 premium online publishers use AdMeld's technology to increase ad revenues and reduce operating costs, including Discovery Communications, Fox News, The Huffington Post, IAC, Thomson Reuters, and World Wrestling Entertainment.

The Huffington Post, for one, has been an AdMeld client since the fall. Since that time, its optimization technology has increased revenues from ad networks at the news site by 200%, according to James Smith, chief revenue officer at The Huffington Post. The technology enabled The Huffington Post "to refocus our own internal resources on direct sales," said Smith. "And that's our main mission."

As a result, AdMeld claims that its customer base has grown fivefold over the past six months. The startup also recently expanded into Europe by opening a London-based office and data center.