Mr. O'Kelley.

For a city that has wears its ambition to become a technology hub on its sleeve, New York lacks those coveted billion dollar exits that lend credibility to the ecosystem and help buttress the ever-multiplying ranks of startups.

Sure, consumer-facing companies like Gilt Groupe, Foursquare and Tumblr have sucked up attention, not to mention venture funding in recent years, but none of those companies appears to be close to the type of major exit or sustained profitability it takes to be king of New York.

But maybe it's not going to be a consumer-facing company that rules the Silicon Alley roost: Maybe what the ecosystem needs is thriving pure play technology firm to serve as New York's totem. At least, that's what AppNexus CEO Brian O'Kelley told Betabeat over the telephone yesterday, fresh off his companies announcement that it had closed a $75 million Series D round.

"New York needs a real technology firm to be the heart of the community," Mr. O'Kelley said. "We want to be that, we want people to point to us and say, 'You can build an innovative tech firm in New York.'"

Of course, New York has long been an ad tech kind of town. Mr. O'Kelley himself helped pioneer the ad exchange as the CTO of Right Media, which sold to Yahoo for $870 million in 2007. Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of ad tech firm DoubleClick that same year remains the exit to beat for Silicon Alley firms—and in turn spawned a series of successful New York companies, including Kevin Ryan's Gilt-10gen-Business Insider empire.

But Mr. O'Kelley said that his company's role in the ecosystem wasn't tied to its particular corner of the industry.

"It's not because we’re an ad business, it's because we’re a real business," he told us. "Our revenue model is proven and understood."

To that end, he said the company was serving 13 billion ads a day, and managed more than $700 million of ad spending last year, with 40 percent of the business coming from abroad.

"Marketing money is really at the core of the Internet," Mr. O'Kelley said. "Is it crazy to say that New York is going to be the hub of the financial ecosystem for the Internet? No, New York is already the hub for the global financial system."

If the company is going to wear that mantle, AppNexus's Series D, which boosted the company's total raise to $140.5 million, won't hurt. Lead by Technology Crossover Ventures, a firm noted its experience helping Facebook, Groupon and Netflix go public, and may put the company on the path to an eventual IPO.

In the meantime, Mr. O'Kelley said he wants to be increasingly active in the tech community, building on past activities like the company's sponsorship of Girls Who Code, or a fireside chat with Fab CEO Jason Goldberg that Mr. O'Kelley hosted this week at company headquarters.

As for the Series D, Mr. O'Kelley said the funds will help AppNexus scale its operations, and hinted at a big announcement this spring, as the company works on what it has called the third generation ad network.

When Betabeat checked in on AppNexus last April, the company had just opened offices in London and Paris, and boasted a staff of 230 employees.

Nine months later, the company had more than 400 employees and says it's serving 16 billion ads a day. The next year could see the company double its head count again, a hiring spree that Mr. O'Kelley said would bring fresh waves of engineering talent to New York.

Some have speculated that a $75 million raise prices AppNexus out of reach potential acquirers. “You’re never too expensive for someone to acquire,” Mr. O’Kelley retorted. However, company’s mission is to “change the advertising world,” he added, and no amount of money would divert him from that path.

As far as an eventual exit goes, Mr. O'Kelley didn't scorn the idea of going public.

"It's just another financing round," Mr. O'Kelley said of the prospect. "We're not going to have pressing need for quite some time. But there's something very special about being public. The idea of being at the center of the ecosystem, and that New York could use a real solid innovative tech company that’s public. We'd love to be that company at the right time."

Sample heatmap

A few months ago over coffee, a source was bemoaning the lack of big exits (and billion dollar ideas) to emerge from the New York tech scene. Who's headed in the right direction? we asked. The source pointed us to an ad-tech startup called Moat.

"When you get the demo, it's like magic!" said the source, referring to a heatmap Moat produces that shows what part of an online ad viewers have been scrolling over. The alchemy lies in Moat's ability to go beyond the rudimentary "click" as a measurement tool for display ads.

Investors seem similarly smitten with the concept. The startup recently closed a Series B investment round for $12 million led by the Mayfield Fund, along with previous investors like SV Angel, Founders Fund, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, and First Round Capital.

Moat's founders also know a little something about gonzo exits. Cofounders (and brothers) Noah and Jonah Goodhart, along with Moat chairman Michael Walrath, were all part of the team behind Right Media, the New York City-based advertising marketplace which was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $850 million. (April, 2007 was a good month for Silicon Alley. A few weeks earlier Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.)

This time around, CEO Jonah Goodhart is trying to figure out how to get big name brands to invest in digital advertising. "If the Internet is going to be a successful place for premium publishers way into the future, we have to figure out how to make brand advertising work," he told Betabeat by phone. "It's effectively what pays the bill in every other medium and in digital it's mostly been direct response," he added, referring to ads for Netflix, Zappos, or University of Phoenix, where the goal is to elicit a direct response.

In other words, you're not clicking on a Jaguar ad and buying a luxury car, but it may be able to influence your purchase all the same. "People are starting to whole-heartedly believe that clicks are the wrong metric," he said, "So we're solving for what should the right metric be."

The founding team is so committed to the mission that neither Mr. Goodhart, his brother, nor Mr. Walrath is taking a dime of salary, even after this latest funding round.

Moat is currently experimenting with 27 different ways that publishers and advertisers can analyzing ads by adding some Javascript. That includes the idea of "in-view impressions," which looks at whether 50 percent or more of an ad is viewable in your browser for at least a full second. They also measure "pause rate:" if, for example, a viewer takes 10 seconds longer to scroll down when a particular ad is on a site. Then there's the heatmap, which aggregates data anonymously on what parts viewers are mousing over and presents it as a compelling infographic.

"We tried to make the products to feel very consumer-focused," he said. "Even though they're business products, we tried to make them easy to use, right to the point." Forbes is currently using Moat to measure premium ads. AOL's Pictela group is also a client.

What if you're only mousing over the ad to close it? "Knowing that everybody comes to your ad and tries to find the close button is actually something we'd want to measure," said Mr. Goodhart. "To brand advertisers, that's good feedback," that can help them create a better ad.

But that's only the half of it. Moat also has a separate team devoted to intelligence in the form of a search engine for display ads. "It's basically like Google, except Google basically skips the ads and just grabs the content. We skip the content, and just grab the ads," Mr. Goodhart explained. There's a free version available on the site, and a paid version for advertisers boning up on their competition or publishers's sales team prepping for a pitch.

The same source who was wowed by the demo also spilled the beans on Moat's secret weapon: 25-year-old president Aniq Rahman. "Yeah Aniq is incredible," Mr. Goodhart said later by email. "Low-key guy who has already sold two companies. Truly brilliant. CS background. Everyone knows and likes him. Definitely one to watch in technology!" Hmm, we'll try not to put him on our next poachables list, but we can't promise anything.

After Right Media's boffo exit, the brothers Goodhart and their partner Mr. Walrath launched an early stage investment firm called WGI Group that has since made about 45 investments, including launching Moat with a $3 million seed round. At the time, it was hard to even get a Silicon Valley VC to fly out to New York.

There was one upside of not having an established ecosystem for financing. "The bar, the standard of how good the company had to be to be successful was higher," Mr. Goodhart noted. "Whereas now, you have one guy, you build some kind of consumer app and all of a sudden he has angel funding and it's not from even traditional angels, it's from hedge fund people. Is it a net positive thing? Maybe yes, maybe no. But as an entrepreneur, I prefer to be around now than then."