The company will use the funds for development of products and expansion of its staff to support its publisher clientele. The firm delivers billions of ads daily in over 100 countries worldwide.

“We are excited to be working with Accel Partners. They have a great investment track record and share our belief in the power of open source software and a passionate publisher community to create real change in the online advertising industry,” stated James Bilefield, CEO of Openads. “We’re also delighted to announce today the private beta release of the hosted version of our software, delivering on the strong demand for this service from publishers large and small.”

Andrew Braccia of Accel Partners said “The rapid growth of the global online advertising market requires the adoption of next generation infrastructure and services for publishers and advertisers alike. Openads’ open source heritage and deep global publisher footprint make it uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in the evolution of the digital media landscape.”

Today, Tribal Fusion’s parent company, Exponential, also announced the launch of a free commercial ad server for publishers. Expo9 has been tested for the past several months by more than 100 clients, including Intermarkets, and serves between 20 and 25 billion ads per month on Exponential’s Tribal Fusion Network. Right Media made a bold move and announced their Publisher Media Exchange product several months ago enabling publishers to have free ad serving and manage their inventory.

Exponential’s vice president of strategic marketing, Alistair Goodman has said that the platform has the capacity to serve up to 75 billion ads per month. Goodman has said that this should offer an alternative to other costly platforms. The platform will be made available full-scale in July.

The innovation, according to Goodman that Expo9 brings is the ability for publishers to manage several accounts and deal with many advertising partners on a single server. Expo9 also provides the technology to maximize revenue by sorting ad content and serving the most relevant ads to each user. Another feature allows usage without the publisher having to download or host the platform themselves.

“It’s an upgrade [to the former Tribal Fusion ad server] and it will be the first time we are making this product, with all its features and functionality, available to publishers to use for free,” said Goodman.

Many critics have speculated that Exponential and Openads, a London-based company, have created free sites with the hopes of being pioneers in what has been hypothesized to be an emerging trend amongst larger companies such as Google.

However Goodman contests this notion stating, “We actually decided to work on this long before the Google/DoubleClick merger. We’ve been testing it for the past couple of years. It’s not a response to the market. In our view, the real value in working with our publishers is helping them know how to better monetize their sites. This gives us a way of deepening our relationships with them and bringing additional value to their businesses.”

With the DoubleClick and Google (coined as GoogleClick) integration and the Yahoo and Right Media integration, there is sure to be some interesting products and new models released from other companies to compete in this new marketplace.