Emerging
FINALIST
A volunteer with the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue team who has contributed to the rescue of more than 90 lost or injured hikers, CEO Tim Cadogan finds the same joy in performing missions for OpenX.
The company first began in 1998 as an open source project in Europe, where its digital and mobile advertising technology became widely adopted. While it was a good basic product, there was no business model.
Coming on board as CEO in 2008, Cadogan had to start from scratch as the first U.S. employee, incorporating the company and defining a vision and strategy for a new kind of advertising technology platform business.
OpenX’s seeks to unleash the full economic potential of digital media companies. Its solutions provide a unique software as a service platform by combining ad serving, an ad exchange, a supply side platform and content valuation.
Cadogan began with building a high quality team with the right skills to deliver on a vision to create a comprehensive display-ad platform for publishers, an alternative to industry titans Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
This mission has remained constant, and OpenX now employs 282 people. The company has seen sustained profitability since the fourth quarter of 2011 and now powers a solution for thousands of customers globally.
At the heart of Cadogan’s approach is actionable innovation. OpenX was one of the pioneers of Real-Time Bidding in the digital ad exchange space, which continues to account for the largest and fastest growing portion of the company’s revenue. Additionally, its Open-SaaS ad server is, via its innovative application program interface design, a platform that allows its partners to innovate to match their own requirements.
In the past 12 months OpenX has created two industry firsts — the first ad serving solution to acquire and fully-integrate a supply-side platform, LiftDNA, and the first company in the ad technology space to add a content valuation solution, JumpTime.
Future plans include core innovation, scale, global expansion and multi-screen.
How to reach: OpenX, www.openx.com
