Smaato Raises $7 million from Singapore’s EDBI and more

Smaato, a mobile advertising start-up that helps publishers to monetize their content through mobile applications has just raised $7 million of fresh funds.

The $7 million round of funding was led by Singapore’s EDBI, together with existing shareholders including Aeries Capital.

The new funds will help Smaato’s expand internationally, in particular to extend its presence in Asia from its Asian headquarters in Singapore.

“Smaato is a leader in the mobile advertising optimization space with its highly innovative advertising optimization platform. As a digital advertising hub, Singapore is an ideal base for Smaato to address the fast growing mobile ad market in Asia, given the high concentration of ad networks, media agencies, and publishers here. EDBI looks forward to working closely with Smaato to partner key industry players leveraging on our networks in the region, and executing the company’s ambitious expansion plans in Asia,” said Ms. Chu Swee-Yeok, CEO of EDBI.

Smaato currently serves more than 11,000 publishers to monetize their mobile content and manages about 20 billion ad requests per month. The mobile ad company is also looking to expand its team of 55 to meet more challenges ahead.

“We have seen a tremendous growth in Smaato’s revenues in 2010. For 2011, we expect even more exponential growth by partnering with leading mobile publishers and app developers worldwide,” said Ragnar Kruse, CEO and Co-Founder of Smaato.

“Singapore has proven to be an excellent location to expand our Asian business. This new round of funding will help us improve our reach, foster product innovation and grow the Smaato team worldwide,” he added.

This investment has signaled Singapore’s goal to become a high tech society. 2 weeks ago at Sequoia Capital’s annual retreat, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that Singapore is aiming to be a high tech, high performance society. He believed that it was because of such an environment in Singapore that has attracted technology giants like Facebook and Groupon to set up office here. It sure has. Perhaps, Singapore could one day be the single location to house all Silicon Valley’s Asian headquarters. But Singapore still has a long way to go to produce her very own “Mark Zuckerberg”.