After building a strong following among publishers in the US, New York startup SimpleReach has declared plans to to expand its business by attracting interest from ad agencies and brands.

The company has taken little time in establishing itself as key player in the native advertising space. Publications including Forbes, The New York Times and Huffington Post are all known users of its system for tracking sponsored content performance across affiliate and social media channels.

Now, after reaping $9 million in a Series A funding round led by MK Capital, SimpleReach is looking to further develop its technology in order to cater for clients from an advertiser or agency background.

Kirk Wolfe, general partner at MK Capital, said his company was “thrilled” to invest in what he describes as a “foundational player” in the native ad market.

ROI-centric

SimpleReach’s content tracking system has proved popular among online publishers, who use the company’s internal reporting to gain a real-time view of sponsored content performance.

The company also looks at the picture through a prospective lens by offering a grading system which determines the potential value of each article before it reaches the web. Pieces are rated on a scale of 0-99 to establish how much they could be worth in terms of web traffic.

Sponsored media is then introduced to a wider audience through SimpleReach’s partnerships with content promoters such as Facebook, Twitter, Outbrain, Nativo and TripleLift.

So far the approach has led to a 800% uptick in revenue since the beginning of 2014, boosted by over seven billion daily content interaction.

SimpleReach reaches out

With the $9 million windfall, SimpleReach hopes to broaden its horizons by pushing the concept of tracking for sponsored content out to agencies and brands. SimpleReach co-founder and CEO Edward Kim has declared that very few advertisers have a distribution strategy for their content and only a small proportion are looking to gauge ROI.

Ahead of what is expected to be a busy end to the year, there will now be a concerted effort on using financial support from partners such as Atlas Venture, Village Venture and High Peaks Venture Partners to assist these groups with their content marketing strategies.