OpenAds snags another $15.5 million in Series B funding

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OpenAds, one of the world's most exciting open-source companies, just pulled in $15.b million in Series B funding. The valuation represents a major "up-round," say my sources (and I've got really good sources on this one). The round was led by Accel out of its Palo Alto office.

Why is this such cool news? Because OpenAds rocks the online advertising world, shaking up Google's cozy dominance of the industry:

Openads lets publishers take control of their advertising, providing simple, powerful and independent tools to schedule, manage and track online campaigns. The software also supports a broad range of ad formats and advertiser types (including direct advertisers and ad networks such as Google AdSense, Yahoo! and Advertising.com). The new hosted version will make it even easier and faster for publishers to make more money from online advertising by eliminating the need to run the software on their own servers.

You can think of OpenAds as the "bottom-up" approach to online advertising. It's a more populist way of going about an increasingly populist phenomenon.