Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Extreme Reach grabs $1.5M in first funding round

By Galen Moore

Needham-based Extreme Reach Inc. has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding for its bootstrapped cross-media delivery service to advertisers and ad agencies. Williamstown-based Village Ventures and Hadley-based Long River Ventures participated in the round, with Village’s Michael Barach and Long River’s Tripp Peake taking board seats at the startup.

Extreme Reach, founded by former executives of FastChannel Network Inc., distributes creative content for ads to cable companies, TV, radio and online publishers via digital transmission and hard copy.

“We help the agencies get their commercials from point A to point B,” co-founder John Roland said. “Once they finish a production shoot and that commercial is done, we help them get it to not only the cable channels, the networks, the websites and the publishers, but we’ll also convert it to the digital format the end destination requires.”

The offering is very similar to what Roland and co-founders Tim Conley, Dan Brackett and Patrick Hanavan were doing at FastChannel, with the addition of interactive ad content for online media, Roland said.

FastChannel sold in 2006 to its primary competitor, formerly called DG Systems Inc., for $40 million. DG Systems is now called DG FastChannel Inc. (Nasdaq: DGIT).

Extreme Reach has been in business with seven Fortune 500 clients since late October, Roland said, although he declined to name them. After launching the company at the end of the first quarter, the founders began fundraising in the fourth quarter of 2008. The company now employs 11 and plans to hire additional staff throughout 2009. New offices are planned in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Extreme Reach already has an office in Louisville, Ky., on the UPS runway, to reach publishers outside their digital network.

Within the next 60 days, Extreme Reach plans to add the ability to stream commercials live to video players. Some midsize and small online publishers don’t have video publishing platforms and want their vendor or partner to deliver content in real time, Roland said.

Later this month, Extreme Reach expects to announce that former AOL LLC executive Tom MacIsaac will join the company’s advisory board. MacIsaac is already a member of the board at Boston-based online media platform company ExtendMedia Corp.