Madhouse

Sector: Mobile advertising

Headquarters: Shanghai, China

Management: Founder and CEO Joshua Maa is joined by CTO Nelson Huang, VP Biz Dev Xia Rongrong, and Director of International and Research Craig Watts, as well as another 70 or so folks with backgrounds in advertising, interactive media, and mobile services and carriers.

Funding: Series A from JAFCO Asia and Gobi Partners.

Secret Sauce: Madhouse serves ads to Chinese mobile phones–more than 65 million impressions so far. Madhouse (from “mobile advertising house,” we presume, but we enjoy the contraction) focuses exclusively on mobile advertising and media. With its sophisticated MadServing ad reporting and serving platform and its mobile ad affiliate network (MadNetwork, of course), which includes major Chinese mobile portals and WAP sites, the company offers full service for your mobile campaigns in China. They’ve already run mobile campaigns for Canon, Dell, eBay, the iPod, GlaxoSmithKline, as well as Chinese companies. The potentially huge market for mobile advertising in China–where predictions on the size of the mobile market cite more than 600 million mobile subscribers, or 47% of China’s population, by 2010–make Madhouse look like an interesting play, as do its focus and team expertise.

Seen and Heard: Red Herring named the company a Red Herring Asia 100 winner, explaining that “Madhouse brings advertisers and mobile web site publishers together via the company’s MadServing system, which lets advertisers target niche markets with focused campaigns based on factors like city, time, handset model, and carrier.”