• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, April 21, 2014

Retargeting firm AdRoll on Monday announced it has closed a $70 million Series C round of funding led by Foundation Capital. The company has now raised a total of $89 million, meaning the new round alone accounts for just under 80% of all of AdRoll’s funding to date.

Joining Foundation Capital in the round were new investors Institutional Venture Partners, Northgate Capital, Performance Equity and Glenmede. Existing investors include Merus Capital, Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. Eric Liaw of Institutional Venture Partners will be joining AdRoll’s board as a board observer.

RTM Daily spoke with Suresh Khanna, SVP of sales and operations at AdRoll, about the big round and what the company plans to do with the money. First and foremost, Khanna said the company will double down on mobile, noting that it will be the “primary focus” of the investment round.

AdRoll has been positioning itself for this shift in recent months, most notably with recent upgrades to allow for cross-device retargeting through its platform.

“We see the future of the ad tech industry in cross-device marketing,” he said. More specifically, he called mobile “the future of the industry” because that’s where consumers are. For AdRoll, “mobile” covers both smartphones and tablets.

Khanna did not reveal what portion of AdRoll’s current business comes via mobile -- and did not say what their target goal is -- but did share that the mobile portion of their business is “growing extremely fast.” Even without exact figures, one can surmise that the company’s push into mobile during Q1 was successful enough to warrant its newfound focus on the channel.

The company has also seen impressive growth overseas in recent months. Khanna said the company’s international growth is actually larger than its growth in the U.S., though the U.S. does have quite a bit of a head start.

AdRoll’s first international office opened in Dublin in October 2013. The company currently has 60 employees working there, and Khanna said it plans to have 120 by the end of 2014. Last month, AdRoll announced a new international office in Sydney, Australia. Khanna said the company will be “aggressively” moving into other areas around the globe, with its sights set on Asian and Latin American countries.

Part of the fresh $70 million that AdRoll raised will be spent on workers here in the U.S., too. To support its new focus on mobile, Khanna said the company’s product and engineering teams will see “significant expansion.” The majority of AdRoll’s product and engineering workers are based in San Francisco.

Lastly, AdRoll will be looking to nab some bigger brands as clients.

“We are inspired by people like Salesforce that started [with] small and medium [clients] before adding support and features to move up,” he commented. “Large customers and agencies are some of our fastest-growing client segments.”

AdRoll is also announcing that it hit a $150 million run rate during Q1. That news comes less than six months after AdRoll announced a run rate of $100 million and just over a year after hitting a run rate of $50 million. Khanna says the company now has over 15,000 customers -- up from 10,000 in October 2013 -- in 110 different countries.

The company has seen impressive growth in the past year, and while it was able to pull in a big round of funding here, an IPO may be on the horizon.

Khanna said AdRoll’s premiere goal is to build a company that will endure, and acknowledged that “at some point in the future that will likely mean going public.”

However, that’s far from an official announcement or declaration, and for the time being AdRoll is focused on building out its mobile and cross-device offerings, expanding internationally and inking partnerships with some large enterprises.