Fremont: San Francisco-based xAd, a mobile-local ad network, has raised $9 million in funding led by Emergence Capital Partners. Silicon Valley Bank and the existing investors, SoftBank Capital and Palisades Ventures, also participated in the funding. The fund will be used to enhance xAd’s existing tools for both publishers and advertisers, as well as further build its patent-pending, ad serving mobile technology that effectively factors in user, contextual and location-based relevance for optimal mobile performance.

Established in 2009 by Dipanshu Sharma, Chandra Kholia, and Sunil Kumar, xAd is the only advertising network in the U.S. offering both targeted search and display. Across its network, xAd aggregates and manages nearly half a billion location-specific ad requests per month, billions of business listings and over one million national and local advertisers. It has research and development facilities in Sunnywale, California and Gurgaon, India, as well as a sales center in Charlotte and several satellite offices across the U.S.

Dipanshu Sharma, Founder and CEO, xAd, said, “Our growth is a reflection of what is happening in the industry. As consumers increasingly migrate to smart devices, businesses will be unable to ignore the potential in mobile-local advertising. Our ability to offer unparalleled accuracy and real-time targeting down to the most-intricate local level, including latitude, longitude and ZIP code, allows us to help businesses of all sizes unlock the potential in their local marketplaces.”

Sharma founded xAd with the goal of conquering the mobile-local search and advertising markets in the U.S. He has founded new ways to leverage technology and to improve business models for entrepreneurs and innovative companies. He previously developed new technologies for Nokia, as well as Co-Founded RockeTalk, a mobile traffic site, and Kadonk, a Microsoft Project Viewer. Sharma was named TeleFusion’s “Technology Leader of the Year” and was nominated as Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”. Sharma holds specialized management/entrepreneurship degrees from UC San Diego, and HUT, Helsinki, Finland. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from DAVV, India, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Delhi University, India.  

With BIA/Kelsey projecting that U.S. spending in mobile-local advertising will increase to $2.8 billion over the next four years, xAd is making a concerted effort to ramp up its proprietary technology and offerings to meet the rising demands of a vibrant marketplace. In March, xAd acquired mobile property go2, one of the top-five mobile-Web guides, classifieds portals and local-directory destinations in the U.S. With the acquisition, it has increased its mobile audience by securing prime, on-desk placement of its content across all major U.S. wireless carriers.