Search-engine marketing company Vantage Media Corp. raised a whopping $70 million Series A funding from Montgomery & Co., Scale Venture Partners, Tudor Ventures and Integral Capital Partners. Montgomery and Co., which acquired major equity stake in Vantage, helped sell MySpace to News Corp. and has been active in a string of deals with Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Sony Corp.
Vantage Media, based in Venice, CA, “specializes in customized, integrated search marketing campaigns for the education sector.” They manage more than 40 million keywords on Web search advertising systems and grew their business by reselling hot search terms from pay-per-click advertising providers Google and Yahoo to online education companies, such as University of Phoenix Online, Corinthian Colleges Inc. and Career Education Corp.
Founder and President Mark DiPaolo originally financed Vantage in 2002 on his credit card, however, the company has been profitable since day one. Vantage Media earns roughly $50M in annual revenue (about $1M per employee) but its new CEO Steve Jillings, the former chief executive of anti-SPAM company Frontbridge Technologies, anticipates growing to $200M in a couple of years. They hope to IPO in 2008.
This is the first time Vantage Media has taken outside funding. The $70M will allow Vantage Media to expand their services to Europe and new industry segments.
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