• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, December 7, 2015

Copenhagen-based ad tech firm Adform has raised $21.5 millions to help it expand its scale around the world and develop new features for its tech stack. The investment represents a debt financing from corporate bonds. The privately held company, which raised a Series B round 18 months ago of $5.5 million, declined to reveal year-end revenues for 2015.

Adform is a full-stack ad-tech platform serving agencies, advertisers and publishers. It has offices in 16 countries and employs 620 people. The new funding will help it expand further into Latin America, Asia-Pacific and notably, the U.S., according to Martin Stockfleth Larsen, CMO.

While declining to reveal its year-end revenue, Larsen told Real-Time Daily: “We have always been a profitable company but we have raised the money in order to become fully global.” Larsen also said Adform is taking a firm stand against so-called walled-gardens, “as we believe the industry deserves a independent, open, transparent and fully agnostic platform.”

The problem, Larsen said, is that bigger companies like Google and Facebook have large tech stacks in which advertisers can buy inventory but can’t really get access to the data. “Advertisers want ownership of their own data and other data,” he said.