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OwnerIQ Inc. has closed a $5.8 million third round of financing, led by an investor who is in one sense new, and in another sense a return backer.
Eric Hjerpe, now a partner at Kepha Partners, invested in OwnerIQ’s $2 million first round of funding in 2007, when he was a partner at Atlas Venture. Now at Kepha, he has returned to lead a growth-equity round in the Waltham-based developer of ad targeting software.
OwnerIQ’s existing backers — Atlas, Common Angels, Egan Managed Capital and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. — all returned to participate in the round, said CEO Jay Habegger. The company plans to use the funding, closed just before Thanksgiving, to hire new executives in sales and marketing, Habegger said. The funding brings OwnerIQ’s total venture investment to at least $13.8 million.
OwnerIQ tracks views of owner manuals published on websites of manufacturer partners. Armed with information about what product a user owns, it uses online ad networks to target and serve ads for its customers, which Hjerpe said now include Sears, Home Depot and American Express.
Hjerpe said the company struggled as the bottom dropped out of the market for online display advertising at the end of 2008 and early this year, but its traction with advertisers and manufacturing partners has been impressive in the past six or seven months, he said.
Looking at the company later in 2009, “I felt the momentum shift, having been on the board before,” he said. “The anvil dropped last December, January and February. I was there on the board for that.”
With 20 employees and a relatively new New York office, the company’s projected revenue for 2009 is triple what it earned in 2008, putting its revenue into the millions, Habegger said.
“Our reach has grown dramatically. We are one of the first to have real-time access to most of the ad inventory that’s out there,” Habegger said. Now, the company plans to push further into the online ad market, he said. “We’re finally segmenting the marketplace and how we approach it.”
OwnerIQ’s funding round was first reported in a regulatory filing posted this morning by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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