SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwire) — 01/22/13 — Optimal, Inc. is pleased to announce that it has added $7 million in funding and that Paul Suh has joined the company as its Chief Financial Officer effective immediately.
New participants in funding Optimal include DoubleRock, The Social Internet Fund, Siemer Ventures, Signal Ventures, John Pappajohn, Warren Adelman (former CEO of GoDaddy), Social Starts, James Altucher and Silicon Valley Bank.
Existing Series A investors Neu Ventures (Jerry Neumann), Stonnington Asset Allocation Fund, and WGI Group (led by Mike Walrath, the founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Right Media, and Noah and Jonah Goodhart) also participated in the funding round.
As part of its Series B, James Altucher (independent) and Suraj Kumar Rajwani (DoubleRock) are joining the company-s board of directors. James Altucher was an early investor in Buddy Media, which was sold to Salesforce in 2012.
Altucher added: “I-m excited to join Optimal as an investor and board member. They have the most efficient platform for reaching and managing a brand-s reach across social media. In other words, I selfishly use them for my own purposes. Additionally, they are a one-stop shop for me to buy media across social platforms, including Facebook retargeting. I had been looking for this, so I invested.”
Optimal founder and CEO, Rob Leathern commented: “We-ve quadrupled social media ad revenue year over year while building awesome real-time ad buying and analytics technology. Paul Suh brings the strong financial and operating expertise that will help us continue to rapidly scale the business in 2013 and beyond, and build upon our leadership in the space. He shares our core values of transparency, commitment to technology innovation and client focus, and I-m ecstatic that he-s a part of our management team.”
Paul was most recently SVP of Finance and Operations at LiveGamer, a digital commerce and video gaming advertising platform. Prior to that, Paul was the CFO and COO of GamerDNA Media, which was acquired by Live Gamer in June 2010. His extensive startup experience includes three years as the COO of Flexplay Technologies and director of corporate development at About.com.
The proceeds of the funding will be used by Optimal to continue to expand its sales/marketing and engineering teams. The company is hiring and open positions are posted at
Optimal helps brands and advertisers manage social advertising campaigns in real-time with its media acquisition and optimization platform, and proprietary audience analytics suite (Audience Matrix and Expander). Optimal is a member of Facebook-s Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program and is based in San Francisco, with offices in Palo Alto, New York, and Chicago. More information at
Contact:
Daniel Ho
Optimal, Inc.
(650) 257-0267
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