Openads Adds $15.5 Million in VC Funding

London-based Openads has raised a new round of funding totaling $15.5 million, bringing their total raised funding to $20.5 million. Openads (formerly known as phpadsnew) is a free, ad server for Web publishers.

From the press release: "The $15.5 million investment was led by Accel Partners, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team to support its large publisher community, which is now using Openads to deliver billions of ads daily in over 100 countries around the world."

Openads has also announced a new hosted version of the application which apparently also is free. We currently use phpadsnew for some ad hosting and have been looking at the move to Openads

Where’s the business model folks? Is it to provide services for those using Openads?

Update: The Openads blog has details on the funding including a note about the business plan, "The hosted version of Openads is free (and of course the downloadable version). In the future, we may offer commercial services to users of either version of openads (downloadable or hosted) if they want additional support."