Deal Radar 2008: Mixpo

Mixpo—a Seattle-based company—offers a platform to simplify the process of handling multimedia on the Internet. Aimed at small and medium business owners, the company concentrates on providing tools to simplify the task of modifying and posting ads online. Unlike other companies in the segment that are still concentrating on video sharing, Mixpo is focused on capitalizing on the online advertising market.

It provides tools that are powerful enough to appeal to ad networks, publishers and businesses that handle their own ads. Mixpo’s tools are paving the way towards making ads more interactive. Their tools let companies insert interactive components, such as a click-to-print coupon midway through a video ad. But it is the back-end tracking, analytics, and quality of ads and imagery that is of maximum interest. Mixpo lets advertisers monitor the effectiveness of their ads in real time and even provides geographical data, allowing advertisers to change their ads based on the response they generate at different spots.

Mixpo is increasingly concentrating on marketing agencies and lead generators who can resell the services to SMBs rather than attracting SMBs individually. Deals with ActiveRain, MCM and Realogics in April 2008 were a step in this direction. In April, the company appointed online advertising veteran Jeff Lanctot to its board of directors.

According to Kelsey, the online video ad market will increase from $10.9 million last year to $1.5 billion by the end of 2012. But Mixpo is not alone in wanting to capitalize the market and faces competition from Turnhere, SpotRunner, Yahoo and Google. SpotRunner is already taking giant strides in the market with the acquisitions of Webilistic and GlobeShooter. SpotRunner also has the advantage of being heavily funded. Mixpo raised $6.2 million in 2006 from Madrona Venture Partners, Working Opportunity Fund, Yaletown Venture Partners, Springbank TechVentures and private investors.

Mixpo is looking to expand its operations from the real estate segment to markets in travel, medical, legal and publishing. According to Seattlepi, Mixpo also plans to share revenue, which in some cases will be as much as half of the total revenue, with publishers, who set the ad prices. The article also mentions that Anupam Gupta, Mixpo’s CEO, is looking to raise more money.

My main concern with the company is its total addressable market (TAM). Intuitively, it feels low to me.

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2008