Boston Start-Up Nanigans Raised $3 Million

Nanigans, Inc., with real-time bidding platform for Facebook that optimizes advertiser spend for downstream actions and lifetime customer value, has closed $3M in Series A financing.

  
Ric Calvillo

Leading the round is Avalon Ventures, and includes several prominent Boston-based Angel investors. Rich Levandov, Managing Director at Avalon Ventures who led initial investment in social gaming company Zynga and behavioral ad targeting company Tacoda, joins the Board. Nanigans will use the financing to expand its team and its Ad Engine platform.

Nanigans, one of the first Facebook Ads API Partners, delivers social ads for over 200 customers including Bonobos, CrowdStar, EA, Gilt Groupe, PopCap Games, and RockYou. The company offers an advanced Facebook advertising solution, automating campaign management at scale and optimizing for downstream actions such as Likes, app installs, registrations, virality and purchases.

"Nanigans is unique in its focus on building social advertising technology that delivers true value and return on advertiser spend," said Rich Levandov, Managing Director at Avalon Ventures. "We look forward to providing the company with the support necessary to continue to accelerate its growth and product innovation."

According to comScore, Facebook is the #1 online display ad publisher in the US, accounting for a third of total online display ad impressions. Nanigans will serve tens of billions of ad impressions this month as the company expands its team, product development, and partnerships.

"Facebook is unprecedented in its reach and targeting parameters, and advertising dollars are following. Our Ad Engine enables marketers to automate the delivery of social ads at scale – and in a way that focuses on delivering customers, and not clicks," explained Ric Calvillo, founder and CEO of Nanigans. "We look forward to working with our new investors who are experienced in scaling successful companies in the social and behavioral ad targeting spaces."

Nanigans recently made several executive hires,
including:

• Rishi Dean, SVP Product, a former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center who comes to Nanigans after being the first employee of Visible Measures and helping build the company into the leading online video measurement platform;
• Derek Yimoyines, VP Engineering, who comes to Nanigans from Avenue100 Media where he led the company’s software development team;
• John Saitta, SVP Operations, who comes to Nanigans from Visible Measures where he was VP of Operations and prior to that VP of Information Technology at Vanguard Direct.