Openads raises $5m for free opensource ad server

Openads, has announced in the last few hours that Index have led a $5m funding round to build out the product and expand the team. The round includes investment from Mangrove, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital, O'Reilly and TAG.

The core Openads team is based in London, is another great example of an interesting European startup, which has manage to exist under the radar screen, quietly creating a geographically diverse business with a commanding position online.

Openads develops free, open source ad-serving software which publishers use to manage the advertising on their websites. It has all the features a publisher would expect from an ad server but at a fraction of the cost of alternatives -- free.

In fact, in a world where so much focus has been placed on advertiser needs the team at Openads has really aimed squarely at understanding the needs of small and medium-sized publishers who want to make more moeny from their website.

Openads is already used by more than 25,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, in fact it has more installations than all competing ad serving solutions combined.

The geographical footprint is very reminiscent of Skype to me -- very strong in the US, but equally present in some of the web's most established (Western Europe) and fastest growing markets (China, Russia, Brazil and Poland).

We're really excited to be working with the team at Openads, who have built a very simple, feature rich and easy to use product that publishers across the world clearly love using. Publishers are having their business squeezed across the board and taking away the cost of ad serving so publishers can focus on raising their effective CPMs is a winning proposition.

There's already been some good coverage already on the blogs - at Mashable, Techcrunch and Buzzmachine.