Ajay Sravanapudi founded LucidMedia has recently raised $4.5 million in funding, led by MMV Financial (MMV). This funding follows the investment in December 2008 from institutional and individual investors including Lake Street Capital and Redleaf Group, bringing the total funding to $13.3 million.

Founded in 1999, the Virginia headquartered company categorizes traffic from many of the Web's most respected networks and exchanges, providing advertisers with a way to more effectively target online advertising inventory and increase their return-on-spend through its patent ClickSense. The company plans to use the funds to expand its recently launched self-service DSP platform, which enables agencies and advertisers manage their online advertising campaigns. The DSP leverages LucidMedia's patented contextual targeting technologies to provide more than 14,000 categories along with page-level transparency and multiple layers of filtering to protect branded advertisers from inappropriate content.

With many networks now repositioning as demand-side platforms, the competition has increased but the team at LucidMedia is not perturbed. When it comes to real solutions where one can log into and traffic a campaign effectively there are not many players. The field is narrower than all the marketing hype implies, says Sravanapudi, Founder and CEO, LucidMedia.

Online advertising is a $30 billion business globally. Since users are moving away from fixed, premium placements to realtime bid inventory across the many exchange aggregators, the demand-side advertising platforms are the wave of the future as their valuations are strong. "We hold a strong foothold in the DSP space and have a 10 year track record of success, which makes us appealing to the VC community," says Sravanapudi. LucidMedia today is 30 people strong with offices in New York as well.