Entrepreneur and digital display advertising veteran Dave Gross is back with a new start-up. Gross, who founded Fastclick and sold it to Westlake Village-based ValueClick in 2005 for $80 million in cash and stock, is now launching Connexity in Camarillo. The new online media company is being funded with an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Persistence Partners (formerly Great Pacific Capital), an early-stage venture fund active in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties. Gross is also the managing partner of Persistence Partners. Gross, who has also designed and produced early electric and hybrid electric passenger vehicles as well as hardware for various aerospace applications including the International Space Station, missions to Mars, and the longest rigid structure ever deployed in space, accordion to his bio, is now driving back into the digital media and advertising business with this new venture. Co-founded by engineer and technologist Dean Banks, Connexity is aiming to make digital ads more relevant by incorporating social networking and recommendation engine database concepts. Recommendation engines act as information filtering systems that attempt to recommend items such as movies, TV programs, music, books, etc. that are likely to be of interest to a specific user . “We have been incubating Connexity since late 2009,” Gross said in a statement. “Connexity is the culmination of several years of research and development bringing together the capabilities of social networking, recommendation engines and online media buying and selling. It’s a new approach, using new technology, built on cutting edge SaaS (software as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) platforms.” In what some consider a very cluttered Internet advertising marketplace already, Banks who serves as CTO of Connexity, believes the company will have a leg up on existing ad networks. The industry is not fully integrating personalization and connectedness into the business of advertising, he said, while others are not fully taking advantage of social networking technologies. Executives said the company is in the process of selecting its headquarters and is currently hiring, and is now developing new software and hardware architectures to improve the relevance of interactive advertising. Gross is not the only one launching new advertising ventures. Earlier this year, early members of Santa Barbara-based Commission Junction, another firm that was acquired by ValueClick, started Impact Radius. The startup aims to bring commission-based advertising to print and broadcast.
