Todacell Raises Further $2M To Help Mobile Marketers Exploit Surplus Ad Inventory

As the market for smartphones and tablets has exploded, so has the available mobile ad inventory, creating a huge surplus that is hard to manage. But one company’s problem is another’s opportunity.

Enter: Mobile advertising network Todacell, which claims to solve the problem through its campaign optimization technology that helps marketers reach the right mobile users. It says that traction is up, resulting in a doubling of revenue in the first half of 2012, and that this was the catalyst for a new $2 million “strategic” investment, which the five year-old company is announcing today.

The new funds come from AfterDox (a group of investors from telephony billing solutions provider Amdocs), as well as private investors. Afterdox is also a previous investor and Todacell has now raised $4.35 million to date.

Additionally, Todacell sees a change at the top, appointing a new CEO, Mark Lehmann, who was previously VP Web & Mobile Marketing at Universal Music Group / Island Def Jam. Before joining Universal Music Group, Lehmann served as VP Web Marketing at mobile content provider Flycell.

Previous CEO and founder Moshe Vaknin, who left to do another startup (Youappi), now serves as a board member and strategic advisor for Todacell.

Meanwhile, of interest to European readers, the Israel-founded company now headquartered in the U.S., has opened a Berlin, Germany office, as well as expanding its London office, seeing it increase its headcount two-fold.

Todacell’s optimization technology works by taking into account the potential targeting attributes of a campaign, such as publishers, creative, device, location, geo-targeting and demographic, and figures out where the campaign is working best. This could be via clicks, click through rate and/or conversions. It then automatically adjusts the campaign to send more eyeballs towards where the action is at, while past performance is also taken into account so that there’s an ability to forecast results to get off to the best start for a campaign.

Todacell’s network claims 10,000 publishers and “billions of impressions”.