Dave Gross, an entrepreneurial engineer who was the founding chief executive of Internet advertising company Fastclick (acquired by ValueClick in 2005), is at the helm of a new company called Connexity that just landed an undisclosed amount of seed funding from early-stage venture fund Persistence Partners (formerly Great Pacific Capital).
That’s kind of a given, as the fund was co-founded by Gross himself, although the firm lists five other portfolio companies where he’s not listed as a member of the management team.
Connexity promises to bring publishers and advertisers together “in a new way”, but to be frank the description of the service leaves me in the dark as to what that new method is, exactly:
Connexity is introducing advertisers and publishers to audience networking and cross-channel connectivity. Connexity applies social networking architecture, recommendation engine learning, and best-of-breed targeting & optimization technology to media representation and media buying.
Lots of rich words, but I’m still not quite sure why this isn’t just another ad network with added social media bells and whistles. I guess we’ll have to wait for the startup to grow up to see if its unique value proposition will become clearer, because the mission statement and the visualization of its methodology below make me none the wiser.
