Billing itself as the “video ad network for the modern age,” Virool has raised a whopping $6.62 million “seed” round, the largest round in Y Combinator’s history.

Considering the size of the round and the inclusion of institutional investors, calling this a “Series A,” or the first round of institutional funding, may seem more accurate. However, founder Alex Debelov said the entire round was raised in on covertible debt and Virool is not taking any members on its board. Hence, it is a seed round.

Virool offers a self-service social video advertising platform to make video content go viral. Advertisers can use it to blast their content out to multiple online publishers, who get paid for the videos they show inside their properties. Developers can also integrate Virool’s API into their apps to more easily execute wide-reaching video advertising campaigns, and companies have access to real-time analytics to track their success.

According to Debelov, many social video ad platforms require a minimum of $100,000 to promote sponsored video content, which makes it inaccessible for smaller advertisers. Using Virool, anyone can start a video campaign for as little as $10 and only pay for the ad when someone watches their content for 30 seconds or longer.

Video advertising is predicted to skyrocket in the upcoming year, a trend investors are clearly paying attention to. Since launching in March, Virool has grown from 200 to more than 30,000 customers, ranging from independent artists to large corporate clients like Intel, Samsung, K-Swiss, Sony, and Orbitz. The platform apparently reaches 750,000 people a day and more than 22 million a month.

The list of contributors include big names in venture capital and angel investing, and Virool will use the funds to meet high demand for its product. Institutional investors include Thomvest Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, Yuri Milner, Phenomenon Ventures, TMT Investments, DominateFund, and FundersClub. Individual investors include Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Troy Carter, Dave McClure, Farzad Nazem, Erik Moore, and Garry Tan. Virool was also the first company to officially receive investment from online investing platform FundersClub.

In October, FundersClub broke Y Combinator’s record with its $6 million round, which was subsequently broken by ZenPayroll’s $6.1 million raise in December. And let’s not forget about YC startups Pair, Ark, and SocialCam which all raised over $4 million in seed funding.

Many in the startup community advise against huge seed rounds because it involves giving away significant equity and freedom early on. Ironically, Virool investor Dave McClure spoke just last week about the importance of not taking excessive amounts of seed financing and keeping valuations in check. Often in the bubble that is Silicon Valley, people in all parts of the ecosystem focus too much on fundraising and equate large investments with validation or success.

Only time will tell if this funding lifts Virool up to the new heights, or if it gets crushed by the weight of the beanstalk.

Check out Virool’s video called “The Secret of All Viral Videos” to learn more … kind of.

The RGM Group figures out how to enable premium brand advertisers to target rich people via online ads, and it’s has gotten richer itself. The Venice, Calif.-based company has raised $21 million in private equity and hired a new chief executive.

Kurt Johnson, a veteran CEO who previously held the top jobs at FastClick and ValueClick, replaces founder Kamran Razavi as the new CEO of RGM Group. Razavi (pictured right) will remain on board full-time as chief strategy officer.

The funding is the first ever for the company and it comes from Riordan Lewis & Haden Equity Partners . It was aided in the funding by New Century Capital Partners.

“I am very ready for this transition,” said Razavi, in an interview with VentureBeat. “I am an entrepreneur. I like to create. As you scale a company to become bigger, it gets harder to do both. We found someone with the right skills to scale us up.”

RGM is profitable, but it needs the money to aggressively accelerate its national sales, creative, product and technology development efforts. It will try to double its headcount by mid-2013 and focus much of its growth in the New York metro market, where it recently opened a new office. RGM uses its different divisions to reach more than 155 million online consumers, many of them who are considered luxury or premium customers who are valuable to advertisers.

At the age of 25, Razavi founded the company in 2004 and it grew to become a large digital media company — one that most people don’t know. It serves hundreds of premium brands and ad agencies, including Jaguar, American Express, and Sony. The company has 24 employees and it will now try to double that.

“As we looked at opportunities within the rapidly growing digital media industry, RGM clearly stood out as a company well-positioned to deliver differentiated, value-added solutions for premium brand advertisers in a dynamic marketplace,” said J. Christopher Lewis, the managing director of RLH. “We are pleased to have the opportunity to work closely with the RGM team to enhance and broaden the company’s unique platform and to build upon RGM’s solid reputation for delivering the highest quality integrated brand advertising solutions.”

RGM’s three divisions include the RGM Alliance, a premium ad network of 300 publications [disclosure: including VentureBeat], that are vertically focused an organized into 14 content channels. The alliance includes publications such as Frommer’s, Men’s Fitness, and SmartMoney as well as growing niche sites such as Digital Trends, ChaCha, and Urbanspoon. The alliance reaches 144 million U.S. consumers through 8 billion page views per month. Market analyst ComScore Media Metrix says RGM is the No. 1 Fashion channel, No. 2 Travel channel, No. 8 Business channel, and No. 16 Health channel online. RGM still screens its web site publishers so that it only reaches users that premium advertisers want to target.

Another division is RGM Exclusive, which provides exclusive media representation for premium publishers and creates unique and custom ad integrations for advertisers. It creates custom online and mobile brand experiences for select clients. A new publisher includes MenuPages.com and other publishers include OpenTable and JustLuxe. The third division is RGM Creative, the creative ad arm of the group.

“Joining the RGM Group as CEO is a rare opportunity to help lead a company that has established the industry’s leading platform for premium national and global brands that directly engages with consumers in the right context of quality digital media,” said Johnson. “With a total reach of more than 155 million U.S. consumers, and deep content integrations with marquee Web sites and publishers, RGM is poised for significant growth as we deliver an expanding array of products to the market at much greater scale.”

New additions to the board include Rob Rodin, former CEO of Marshall Industries, as well as Chris Lewis and Ryan Smile of RLH.

Rivals include companies such as Glam Media, Travel Ad Network, and Conde Naste Digital.

Chicago’s Hyde Park Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund, led the investment. Other investors include I2A Fund, Western Technology Investment, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Firestarter Fund, and Hyde Park Angels.

Tap.me targets brand advertisers who want to get noticed by gamers without interrupting gameplay sessions. It creates contextual and authentic branded “integration points” within web and mobile games. It does that by getting developers to identify something in a game that can be sponsored, like an ability to jump higher. Tap.me then finds advertisers to sponsor that capability.

Jeffrey Lapin, former chief executive of Atari, has joined Tap.me’s board. Tap.me’s platform is expected to hit 25 million gamers by June. Matt Spiegel (pictured), chief executive of Tap.me, said the round will help give the company more momentum.

Tap.me  said that Edmonton, Canada-based Fluik Entertainment has agreed to integrate Tap.me’s platform into Fluik’s games, including the popular Office Jerk mobile game. Fluik’s games have been downloaded more than 20 million times.

“Fluik is thrilled to partner with Tap.Me, whose platform will help us monetize gameplay in a way that enhances the experience for the gamer, which is of paramount importance to us,” said Victor Rubba, co-founder, Fluik. “This is the future of meaningful game and brand integration.”

Additions to Tap.me’s board include Sam Yagan, co-founder of OKCupid and Excelerate Labs, and Stuart Larkins, managing director of I2A. Tap.me was originally founded in 2010 as a game company, but it changed its focus to in-game ads.

[Photo credit: Tap.me]

Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, said the platform  combines Flurry’s analytics with a new ad platform aimed at unlocking the full potential of the mobile app advertising space. The platform is designed to make targeted campaigns and reaching high-value consumers easier for ad agencies, direct advertisers, and ad networks.

Flurry will provide services such as ad serving and network optimization based, and advertisers will pay Flurry only when they use premium targeting to earn additional revenue. These services are tied to Flurry’s analytics data, which tracks more than 30 billion user sessions a month across 160,000 apps on more than 500 million mobile devices.

San Francisco-based Flurry says that consumers are spending 23 percent of their time in apps (vs. TV, Online, Radio and Print) but only 1 percent of advertising dollars are allocated toward mobile today. The gap exists because it isn’t easy to target the entire app-using audience. But Flurry argues that its reach and depth of data can help publishers and advertisers bridge the gap.

For example, if Nike wants to reach 18-year-old to 24-year-old women for a new shoe, their ad agency would use Flurry to buy ads, target the audience, and reach people on multiple mobile platforms using the Flurry AppSpot ad platform. Flurry uses its demographic data to target the ads at the right people and then it reports back the results about whether the users clicked on the ads or otherwise engaged with it. Because the ads hit the right demographic, they are likely to be received more effectively.

In this case, app publishes supply the inventory into which ads are served. Ad campaigns fill that inventory with ads that are targeted at particular users. Flurry’s data enables better targeting, allowing relevant ads to be shown to the right users.

“Compared to online advertising, mobile app advertising can be simpler, better and more powerful,” said Simon Khalaf, president and chief executive officer of Flurry. “In online, there are simply too many moving parts between the advertiser and the publisher, including ad servers, ad exchanges, supply side platforms, demand side platforms and data management platforms. In the app advertising world, Flurry AppSpot delivers an optimal path between advertisers and publishers, adding in ground-breaking targeting and analytics.”

Flurry’s backers include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and First Round Capital.

The RGM Group figures out how to enable premium brand advertisers to target rich people via online ads. And weak economy or not, the company has benefited as those brands shift more of their budgets for chasing wealthy consumers to online publications.

The Venice, Calif.-based company has been profitable ever since Kamran Razavi started it in 2004 at the age of 25. In an interview, Razavi said the company still has momentum and tripled its revenues last year.

“We’ve got a unique model for premium brands,” Razavi said. “We have ads that hit the right person and do so in the right way. We really stand out in that way. We are more efficient when it comes to deploying advertising.”

In August of last year, the company’s RGM Alliance division, an ad network that places ads from premium and luxury brands, had more than 250 U.S. publications in its network. Those included Yachting, Luxury Travel, Burda Style, Zagat, Men’s Fitness, Woman’s Day, Elle, Boating, and Esquire (disclosure: and VentureBeat). Now RGM reaches 350 publications, including 34 new sites this year.

RGM now reaches 124 million unique visitors per month, compared to 117 million in August. In May 2009, the company had 21 million users per month at 66 publications. RGM is now the 61st-largest ad-focused ad network in the U.S., according to comScore. RGM expects it will enter the top 50 in the next month.

“We are still profitable and we haven’t had to raise money,” Razavi said.

RGM still screens its web site publishers so that it only reaches users that premium advertisers want to target. Razavi says the alliance continues to be transparent to both advertisers and publishers, with no hidden sites or traffic sources.

One of the big growth areas is custom ads created by one of RGM’s own divisions for the advertisers. RGM has created ads for Jaguar, Lexus, and ForeverMark on RGM’s own JustLuxe site, which has millions of unique monthly visitors. RGM is also expanding into mobile ads for the iPad, iPhone, and other platforms.

The company has 35 employees. Razavi said he is proud he didn’t raise a large amount of money, like other digital media companies do, diluting the entrepreneurial spirit. Razavi himself came from Tiffin, Ohio, and moved to Los Angeles with all of his belongings in the back of his pickup at age 22. Now at 32, he’s still a young buck.

“I hope my story will if nothing else inspire another young buck to venture out on their own and build a company themselves,” he said. “My story proves this is possible.”

For custom content, the CPM (cost per mil, a measure of ad revenue per 1,000 people) is something like $100. For standard ads, the CPMs are around $8 to $10 for the RGM Alliance. Lower-quality ad networks generate CPMs of $3 to $5.

Razavi said that premium markets have recovered since the recession of 2008-2009, and that has helped the company grow. But he said advertisers are still shifting a lot more of their ad budgets to online publications, and that has helped RGM grow even faster.

“On a global level, we still have a recession-like economy, but online ads could grow 23 percent in 2012,” Razavi said. “People are predicting that online will move past traditional media this year.”

Rivals include companies such as Glam Media, Travel Ad Network, and Conde Naste Digital.

Image courtesy of atyp_koK, Shutterstock

Steve Tack is chief technology officer of APM Solutions for Compuware Corp.

We are no longer isolated. Who could have imagined a tiny country like Greece could threaten the world’s economy? A similar interdependence holds true for today’s websites.

In the web’s early days, you hosted a site and all its applications on your own infrastructure which you fully controlled. Today’s web businesses are increasingly comprised of several outside sources that your company must depend on 24/7. Typically these outside sources consist of third-party components that are assembled by the browser. They can include functions like content delivery networks (CDN), advertising networks, video, newsfeeds, shopping carts, web analytics or ratings and review systems.

Just one poorly performing service can cause an entire application to slow down.  We all remember the Amazon EC2 problems that wreaked havoc with thousands of websites this year. Similar problems have occurred with Microsoft Office 365 and Akamai, leaving many web businesses feeling helpless. If your website was using a service or application delivered by an affected supplier, it likely lost that capability, experienced a performance slowdown, or shut down entirely. Not good if that service was a checkout function directly linked to your revenue.

We recently conducted research on the number of third-party components used by the typical website. What we found has direct implications for the traffic and revenue of every website. The chart below tells the story: a typical website on the west coast of the US, for example, depends on as many as 12 individual domains to deliver content to users to complete a transaction.

When a visitor opens your web page in their browser, a call goes out to all these domains, many likely from third parties. Think of the Facebook button, or the Bing search box, that email capture function or the YouTube video, even a CDN; they’re all being delivered by an outside service.

As most web businesses know, the average website visitor is increasingly impatient, with nearly a third of them abandoning a web page if it takes longer than five seconds to load. While you can optimize the performance of the application components you deliver, do you have a guarantee that five, 10 or more outside web services will do the same?

So how do you deal with the dark side of third-party content and services and take back control? We’ve found that the best-performing companies follow these three core guidelines:

1. Choose third-party components wisely, within your set business goals
You have a vast and varied choice of outside services, so it’s easy to load up on many that don’t address your business objectives. Determine why a service is necessary and ask:

• How much revenue is it generating?
• How often does my audience use it?
• Does it offer a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing performance?
• Is the speed-to-market benefit greater than the downside risks?

2. Create a mitigation strategy
Outsourcing portions of your web business heightens the need for a backup plan. Start by benchmarking the response time and availability of the service prior to signing the contract. Test it prior to launch. With your proof of concept secured, devise a fast-fail program so if the service does crash, it doesn’t take down the entire page or site. For critical features like shopping carts, also consider redundant services.

3. Measure outside services from the end-user’s perspective under all conditions
Convinced that the system is solid at the core, you’re still not home free. Now you must test and monitor it from the most important perspective: your customer’s. This means ensuring users in all relevant geographies have a web experience on par with your site’s performance standards. Testing for peak load periods is also part of this process. Measuring performance from the end-user’s perspective is the only way to know if your customers are having problems.

The interdependency of the web will only accelerate as companies leverage more third-party services to connect with their customers. Making use of these services helps even the smallest web and mobile sites create a unique offering. Being aware of the risks and planning for them, will help you capture the upside and minimize the downside.

The company is announcing today it has struck advertising partnerships with three major automotive media publishers: VerticalScope, Internet Brands, and CarDomain Network.

With its ability to insert ads into pictures, GumGum will help the publishers better monetize their properties and add new functions such as the ability for users to build and price their own cars in a visual way.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based GumGum’s image-monetization technology serves thousands of premier internet web sites by overlaying text, banner, or Adobe Flash ad units on top of images. Brand marketers have taken to the in-image ads. That’s because the photos — from Britney Spears photos to anything that the paparazzi shoot on a given day — are magnets for eyeballs. That is, people pay attention to them. GumGum now reaches 110 million unique visitors a month by serving billions of in-image ads per month.

Rob Laidlaw, president of VerticalScope, said that his company chose GumGum (despite its silly name) because it was effortless to deploy, had comprehensive site-level reporting, and unmatched sell-through rates. VerticalScope is using the technology across 200 auto web sites. GumGum can target ads to photos at a keyword level and do it on a massive scale.

GumGum says the click-through rates are 20 times higher for its ads relative to traditional ad networks. Ophir Tanz, chief executive of GumGum, says he sees a big chance for automotive advertisers to create highly targeted campaigns. When done well, these ads enrich the user experience and position the brand alongside content that is relevant to the brand’s story.

Other major partners include Time Warner, Hearst, and Glam Network. GumGum was formed in 2007 and it has 15 employees. Rivals include Luminate and Image Space Media.

GumGum has raised $3.8 million from GRP Partners, First Round Capital, and Crosscut Ventures.

Kamran Razavi, who founded the company in 2004 when he was 25, said in an interview that RGM is on its way to tripling its revenues in 2011, and it hasn’t raised any money.

The company’s RGM Alliance division is an ad network that matches luxury and premium brand advertisers with 250 publications that focus on high-end readers, including Yachting, Luxury Travel, Burda Style, Zagat, Men’s Fitness, Woman’s Day, Elle, Boating and Esquire (disclosure: and VentureBeat). The alliance now reaches 117 million unique visitors per month and generates over 2.5 billion page views. The numbers are enough to put RGM on comScore’s list of the top 50 internet audiences. Back in May, 2009, the company had just 21 million users per month among 66 publications.

“It’s a point of pride that we have been profitable since 2004 and haven’t had to raise any money,” Razavi said. “In the last few years, we have evolved our approach to ads. We create a new niche for both publishers and advertisers.”

Back in December, 2010, RGM reached 91 million users a month via 200 high-end publications, and it generated 1.5 billion page views. The differentiator for RGM is that it can reach so many page views with a relatively small number of publications.

Razavi said the company stringently pre-screens web site publishers so that it works only with those that meet the standards required by premium advertisers in areas of brand integrity, site content, ad placements and audience. Razavi says the alliance continues to be transparent to both advertisers and publishers, with no hidden sites or traffic sources. Advertisers select a channel and can target their campaigns based on geography or desired behavioral categories. RGM’s advertisers include luxury brands such as Jaguar, Cadillac, Waldorf Astoria, Bombardier, SkyJet, Debeers and others. But the advertisers also include premium brands such as Acura, HSBC, Bose, Qantas, Horchow, Arizona Tourism, and Bosch.

The company also has its own luxury goods web site, JustLuxe, which has a couple of million unique monthly visitors. And RGM has a site-specific exclusive media representation business and a creative services division that creates high-engagement ads. The company was recently named the exclusive media representation firm for OpenTable.com, which has become the world’s largest restaurant reservation system. That means that RGM provides the ads for OpenTable.com.

Razavi said the company recently hired Gabe Greenberg, a former Microsoft marketer, as chief revenue officer. Razavi said the company strives to create highly effective custom ads that have a unique feel yet can be run across many publications across the network. RGM separates its publications into channels, such as a health channel, which is one of the largest on the internet.

The company has 35 employees. For custom content, the CPMs (cost per mil, a measure of ad revenue per 1,000 people) is something like $100. For standard ads, the CPMs are around $8 to $10 for the RGM Alliance. Lower-quality ad networks generate CPMs of $3 to $5.

Razavi said that luxury markets have recovered since the recession of 2008-2009, but the company has diversified beyond luxury brands to premium brands as well. One question is whether rocky times in the stock market will prompt another recession that will affect luxury spending.

“The last recession stunted our growth, but we continue to grow and benefit from widespread adoption of internet advertising,”Razavi said. “There are more people coming online and more brands that want to reach those affluent people than ever before. There could be a pause in spending, but most companies have more cash now than ever before.”

Razavi doesn’t disclose the company’s revenue numbers, but he said that profits are in the eight-digit range. Rivals include companies such as Glam Media, Travel Ad Network and Conde Naste Digital.

That a lot of capital for an ad-based startup, but the San Francisco company believes it can deliver superior advertising performance through its patent-pending ShareGraph technology. The ShareGraph technology analyzes how users communicate with their closest connections and then identifies the specific consumers who are most likely to engage with a brand’s ads. RadiumOne says this works better than traditional behavioral targeting techniques. It also enables consumers to share ads with their friends, creating a multiplier effect for advertisers.

The company is the brainchild of Gurbaksh Chahal, founder and chief executive. He became famous as a whiz kid entrepreneur, founding two ad companies worth $340 million by the age of 25. He founded the ad network ClickAgents at age 16 and sold it in 2000 for $40 million. Then he started behavioral targeting firm BlueLithium in 2004 and sold it to Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million.

RadiumOne is a restart. Originally, the company started 18 months ago as gWallet, which sought to monetize social games through special ads known as offers. The offer business went through a crisis last fall as users felt like some of the offers were scams. The gWallet business is now a subset of RadiumOne’s business and is known as R1 Social.

Chahal sought to come into the offer market as a clean company that worked only with major advertisers and brands. The company is working with more than 200 Fortune 500 brands. But Chahal said he had always wanted to start an ad network but had been prohibited from doing so by a non-compete agreement with his previous company. That non-compete expired on Oct. 15, 2010.

Chahal said he started gWallet to learn more about the social space and it succeeded in bring more than 100 brands into the social space via the offer business. There is synergy between R1 Social and RadiumOne’s ad network business, as both share similar publishers and advertisers. And R1 Social helps ad targeting by providing anonymous user data to RadiumOne.

The company will use the round for international expansion and acquisitions. The company recently opened a United Kingdom office and will launch in continental Europe and Asia-Pacific. The company says it became profitable in the fourth quarter.

Chahal says that the goal of RadiumOne is to use social data to improve online advertising and make a measurable impact for both advertisers and consumers. The company plans to fill a void of socially-targeted advertising outside of Facebook to the open web.

The round was led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from DFJ Esprit and previous investors Adams Street Partners and Trinity ventures. That brings the total raised to $33.5 million. The company has 80 employees and plans to grow to 150 by the end of the year.

Rivals include Media6Degrees, Advertising.com, and SpecificMedia. RadiumOne says it is the only ad network that effectively leverages the social web to serve ads via ShareGraph. One of its innovations is the “R1 Like Button,” which places a button on display ads that lets consumers “like” or share the ad. That helps ads spread in a viral way and gives advertisers feedback on the kind of ads that users want to see.

Unlike friends on Facebook (where users are “connected” to people whom they may not know well), RadiumOne believes that the most significant insights into consumers can be obtained by understanding what people share with a much smaller circle of friends.

ShareGraph relies on real connections where users send or share content with each other in a tighter circle. It leverages all user activities through the whole internet, rather than just a specific social network. ShareGraph measures the strength of a connection between two users based on the type of sharing they do, how often they share, and how recently they communicated.

Adknowledge

Adknowledge plans to use the money to expand its ad network worldwide so that its advertisers can reach users in the mobile, video, content, and display markets. In other words, just about everyone that the internet reaches.

Kansas City, Mo.-based Adknowledge said it has doubled its revenue over the past 12 months through acquisitions and internal growth. The company said it is the largest privately owned internet ad network in the U.S., with more than 330 employees and $300 million in revenue.

JMI Equity, a private equity firm, led this latest investment, while Bank of America led the debt financing.

Adknowledge operates a long-tail marketplace, http://www.bidsystem.com, for advertisers who are looking to syndicate their ads into different types of non-search markets. It can target either cost-per-click or cost-per-action models. That is, it can funnel advertisers into banner ads or into special offers, where a user can accept an offer such as watching a film clip instead of paying for an item. More than 10,000 advertisers use Adknowledge to target hard-to-reach segments such as casual games, email, social networks, display ads, mobile ads, and others.

“It’s easy to advertise with Google, Bing and Facebook, but much tougher to reach the rest of the Internet because it’s so fragmented,” said Adknowledge CEO Scott Lynn.

Adknowledge was founded in 2004 and has acquired firms such as Miva, Super Rewards and Hydra. It competes with companies such as Tapjoy in offers and others in ad networks.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The startup overlays text ads on Web images, similar to those seen on Google’s YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Publishers can integrate a snippet of JavaScript and start monetizing their images, while advertisers can choose from a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) model to serve their text-based ad. Image Space offers an analytics tool for publishers and ad-creation tools for advertisers.

Founder Kevin Tung later confirmed the funding to TechCrunch, a tech blog.

While the idea of serving ads over images is far from ubiquitous, it’s not entirely new. The most popular player in the space is GumGum. GumGum started in 2006 as a service to help content owners track and monetize their photos, but eventually morphed into what is essentially an ad network for images. It has signed up popular publishers TMZ, Internet Brands, AskMen, and Glam.

Back in January, Image Space Media raised $2.9 million from New Atlantic Ventures, Ridgeline Capital, and Michael Gordon, having launched at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier in the year. Tung has stated the startup is planning to raise a complete Series B round in 2011.