the Rubicon Project Secures $6 Million in Funding

Clearstone Venture Partners Sole Series A Investor

Los Angeles, Calif. – October 2, 2007 – the Rubicon Project, a company with a mission to automate the large, yet highly inefficient Internet advertising industry, announces Clearstone Venture Partners as the sole Series A investor. Clearstone invested $4 million in equity funding for incubation and product development. Separately, an additional $2 million in venture debt was secured through Square1Bank.

“It takes a great team to build a great company. We have an outstanding execution team with solid fundamentals and high aspirations. Clearstone’s philosophies, as an investment partner, makes for an ideal match,” said Frank Addante, CEO and Founder. “Clearstone’s past successes with Overture on the advertising side and PayPal for automated billing systems translates perfectly with the markets that the Rubicon Project is aggressively pursuing.”

“Clearstone prides itself on investing in and helping build young companies that are trying to solve massive market inefficiencies,” said Sumant Mandal, Managing Director of Clearstone Venture Partners. “We believe in the entrepreneurial spirit the Rubicon Project team embodies and we look forward to their market success.”

the Rubicon Project’s private beta site launches October 8th, 2007.

About the Rubicon Project
the Rubicon Project is a group of industry-experienced, aggressive and passionate renegades dedicated to bringing a new level of efficiency to the fragmented Internet advertising space. The founders of the Rubicon Project shook up the online advertising industry in 1998 when they created L90/adMonitor, one of the most successful Internet advertising platforms that served over 3,000 of the web’s most recognized sites, reaching 65% of the Internet population before DoubleClick acquired it.

$27 Billion was spent advertising online in 2007, yet it’s still too hard for websites to sell their ad space online. While Internet advertising is an explosive market, it is an incredibly inefficient one with advertisers spending money with 300+ disparate advertising networks worldwide (e.g. Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Tacoda, HispanoClick and Adtegrity). the Rubicon Project’s web-based, self-serve solution gives any size website the most complete access to the total available advertising market and its smart matching™ technology does all the work to perfectly match each ad impression with the optimal money-making opportunity. the Rubicon Project is the new online advertising standard that makes it effortless for websites to generate the mad cash they've always dreamed of. And, it’s free to join. Websites looking to make more money while doing less work should visit: http://www.rubiconproject.com.

About Clearstone Venture Partners
Clearstone Venture Partners (http://www.clearstone.com) excels at leading early-stage investments and company development across numerous sectors including: business and consumer Internet within digital media, publishing and internet advertising, mobile and communication offerings as well as enterprise and carrier technologies. Clearstone prides itself on its many successful incubated projects and uses their expertise in supporting founding teams all the way from initiation to exit. Past successes, among many, include: Overture (sold to Yahoo), Paypal, MP3.com, and Netzero/ United Online. Clearstone has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Mumbai, India.

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