AdBrite Inc. continues to be a Fu**edCompany, as in funded.

The advertising sales and services network founded by Phillip Kaplan, notorious bubble chronicler and founder of numerous popular personal Web sites, including one that cannot be fully named here, landed $23 million in Series C funding.

The round brings total funding in AdBrite to $35 million.

The deal included new investors DAG Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif., and Japan's Mitsui Ventures, joining previous backers Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park and Artis Capital Management of San Francisco, and is designed to fully fund the company.

Kaplan, now chairman and president of products, said the company does not disclose revenues or projections of profitability, but he said the new money is designed to be AdBrite's final private funding.

Kaplan founded the company three years ago, raising $4 million from Sequoia in September 2004 to build a site to automate advertising orders for small Web site operators and bloggers, but he said the network has evolved quite a bit to become the third-largest Web advertising network behind Google Inc. and Advertising.com Inc. in page views, according to Reston, Va.-based market research firm comScore Inc. He said the new funding will support continued technical development of the network and support, which now includes an office in Israel to augment the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

AdBrite continues to have a strong system for small publishers. Kaplan said the company is processing about 1,000 new applications from publishers each day, but he said the company also is adding services for publishers of all sizes, and that it has a significant amount of volume from other ad networks. He said the company has undergone a significant transformation, particularly in two major areas.

"When I started the company I was running about 12 content-based Web sites that were each running about 10 ads, and there was no way to automate them, so it became a full-time job," he said. "AdBrite was originally built to solve this problem, and it still does that, but two big things have changed."

To accommodate larger, more sophisticated users, AdBrite has moved on from a classified ad model of flat rates on ads running for one, 7 or 30 days, and instituted automated methods for choosing sites where ads appear rather than selecting one by one.

"Now that we have more than 50,000 sites it is kind of hard to pick them. So we transitioned to a performance-based auction," Kaplan said. "Advertisers can select sites by geography, content, demographics and contextual relevance."

Kaplan said the company's growth has attracted a lot of interest from investors, but he would not comment on fielding acquisition inquiries in the M&A intensive online advertising space. AdBrite raised its current round in a climate in which Google, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. have made high-profile acquisitions in the online advertising sector this year with the additions of DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion (still pending), aQuantive Inc. for $6 billion and Right Media Inc. for $680 million, respectively.

Kaplan would not disclose the magnitude of increase in valuation for the current round, but he said the company had multiple term sheets, and selected the current syndicate based on experience and strategic ties, particularly in international expansion.

DAG Ventures partner Young Chung said the firm was attracted by AdBrite's rapid growth, and its potential to develop new, more effective online ad formats and for advertisers to reach consumers on sites of all sizes.

Kaplan said among the company's recent offerings are formats for video advertising and a service to increase inroads in selling to other advertising networks. He said AdBrite recently began offering a reserve-pricing product but that it has not previously publicized the offering. The system allows customers to guarantee the best pricing by submitting codes they use with Google or other networks, which then are placed in the automated AdBrite auction, and if they come up with the low bid, AdBrite will forgo its fees on the transaction.

Kaplan said AdBrite did not use a placement agent in raising the new financing. The company had legal work on the deal from Anthony McCusker of Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian LLP in Menlo Park.