San Francisco, California-based iSocket raised $5 million in its most recent funding round, TechCrunch reported. Time Warner Investments led the round which was also participated in by Condé Nast, R&R Venture Partners and investor Vivi Nevo. R&R Venture Partners is the fund that Dick Parsons, the former CEO of Time Warner, and Ronald Lauder established.

iSocket is a direct ad sales platform that provides tools to sell ads online. Information from CrunchBase showed that the platform simplifies the buying and selling of inventory, whether they are fixed price, premium or reserved. Sales teams of top publishers can focus on relationships and strategy because iSocket For Publishers or iFP have sales automation and programmatic direct tools while brands, agencies and buying and planning platforms can directly execute orders of guaranteed inventory with publishers using iSocket For Advertisers or iFA. A lot of the errors and overhead costs of the manual media sales process is removed by iSocket, the information said.

The focus of iSocket is on sales where advertisers and publishers like TechCrunch have a direct relationship. Because these sales can take as many as 50 steps before it can be completed, iFP streamlines it by automating majority of the process, TechCrunch reported.

Richard Jalichandra, iSocket Chief Executive Officer, said in a statement about the funding, "We're very pleased to have Time Warner and Condé Nast, two of the biggest names in publishing, endorsing our model for advertising sales automation." Jalichandra formerly headed Technorati and joined the iSocket teal last fall, the report said.

Launched in 2009, iSocket said it is the world's first programmatic direct solution for premium publishers. Two years later, it became the first company to integrate with Google's DFP. Some of the publishers working with iSocket include Forbes, Reuters, Mashable, VentureBeat, Conde Nast and Microsoft, information from the firm's website showed.