• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, June 9, 2011

Online ad startup Taykey, which targets audiences across social media, today formally launched its service and announced closing second-round funding of $9 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Softbank Capital and Crescent Point.

Founded in Israel in 2008, the 19-person company plans to use the new capital in part to hire additional engineers in Tel Aviv as well as build up its New York-based sales force.

Taykey's advertising platform uses a proprietary algorithm that analyzes trending data in real-time to help marketers reach intended audiences in the right place at the right time on Facebook, Twitter and other online social properties. In that vein it's competing with other companies trying to turn social media data into advertising gold including Lotame, median6degrees, 33Acrosss and RadiumOne.

What Taykey says sets it apart from rivals is its focus on trending analysis -- to figure out not just where a given audience is, but where it's going next. "Taykey empowers advertisers to tap into the real way audiences move online -- in vast flocks not determined by age and gender, but by interests," said co-founder and CEO Amit Avner, who launched his first startup, now bWitty.com, at age 14.

At the same time, Avner told AdExchanger.com late last year that the company does not build behavioral profiles of users, promising a "privacy safe" ad solution. Online tracking practices have come under increasing scrutiny in the last year, with a bill introduced in April that would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to create privacy regulations as well as a site for people to opt out of behavioral targeting.

Taykey says its platform is based on semantic technology developed in the last two years that relies on publicly available data. In the AdExchanger interview, Avner also said the company serves ads with "generic" creative, "but when we detect and forecast a big upcoming trend we contact the advertiser and suggest they will create a specific creative for this trend." Campaigns are priced on a CPM or CPC basis.

Prior to launch, Taykey worked with Pepsi to drive awareness and participation for the Pepsi Refresh Project, the brand's crowd-sourced effort to fund innovative ideas. In the first two days of a targeted Facebook campaign, ads the company served engaged over 17,000 relevant consumers. A separate Facebook effort for Pepsi's Lipton Brisk brand led to a 200% increase in interaction in two days, according to the ad company.

"Taykey constantly tracked consumer conversations that were happening across Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media, then helped place our brands in front of consumers who were active and engaged in the right conversations, in real-time," said Shiv Singh, head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages America, in a statement.