Apptera, a voice and visual mobile ad network, has won $10.5 million in extra funding to help the company push forward in the mobile advertising space.

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures and Walden International contributed to this round of funding. The investment coincides with the appointment of former Yahoo sales chief David Karnstedt to the Apptera board of directors.

AT&T and AOL use Apptera's MobileAd Xchange platform to serve ads to their audiences. Randy Haldeman, chief marketing officer of Apptera, talks about how this new investment plays into the company's growth plans. The interview:

What does this mean for your company?
It means a couple of things. It's a validation that our strategy of voice and visual, targeted mobile advertising is on the right track.

We've proven to our original investors who re-subscribed for this round that through partnerships with big companies such as AOL, the technology delivers results for advertisers, usually with response rates 200 percent higher than other approaches.

Funding in this environment -- no mean feat, is it?
Yup. As with most downturns, venture capital shies away from markets crowded with similar solutions and moves more forcefully into markets where one or two companies demonstrate clear value to their customers. That formula never changes.
While there are scores of online ad networks and many more in the mobile space, Apptera is the only company that delivers an advertising solution -- MobileAd Xchange -- that marries the two core components of modern mobile phones: voice and visual (SMS/MMS/video).

What will you do with the new investment?
Go to Disney World!

No, really, this new round of funding will enable us to drive into other application areas -- travel and retail, for example -- that can really exploit the power of voice and visual technology.

The same technology that can trigger a local restaurant ad off a movie show time call can also be used to monetize calls to airlines by offering rental cars or hotels at the caller's destination.

What does [former Yahoo exec] Mr. Karnstedt bring to the table?
David Karnstedt brings a breadth of experience and strong track record of success building new direct-response and branded advertising networks.

His work at Overture -- the first company to place highly relevant advertising on search result pages -- and more recently at Yahoo, will be a huge catalyst for Apptera's continued growth.

Where are you and your team taking Apptera?
Right now, there's a consumption gap in mobile that rivals what happened to the Internet in the early part of this decade.

That is, advertisers continue to spend the bulk of their money in TV, print and online. Yet, most Americans will not leave their homes without their cell phones. They spend all day with their devices, and no one is properly trying to monetize that consumption.

As I said in the panel that you witnessed [at last week's Mobile Marketing Forum outside San Diego], text messaging has high penetration, but low richness of media. WAP banners have higher richness, but low penetration.

Voice has high penetration -- all 5 billion phones in the world, 3.5 billion mobile and 1.5 billion landline, can handle voice -- and high richness of media.

We're forging ahead into different verticals to exploit this rich opportunity, beyond entertainment and free-411, to monetize the billions of calls that different industries receive from mobile consumers.