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Visible Measures CEO Brian Shin says it is time for his company to move out of the execution phase and start selling like crazy. Visible Measures

Venture investors are continuing to back digital-advertising startups, even as their public counterparts wither on Wall Street.

Boston-based Visible Measures is the latest one, scooping up funding from existing investors in a round that valued the nine-year-old company at less than $200 million, which is less than its previous funding round.

“We think ultimately growth is what’s going to matter and investing for higher growth is important at this stage of the company,” said Larry Bohn, a managing director at General Catalyst Partners, which invested $7 million alongside Mohr Davidow Ventures, DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital, Commonfund and Advance Publications in the Series F round.

Mr. Bohn, along with other investors who have recently backed the likes of SmaatoInc. xAdInc. and AppNexus Inc. is betting on the long game. EMarketer expects the market size for digital video ad spending to double from last year to more than $8 billion in 2016 in the U.S. alone. Including other formats like text and images and applied worldwide, those numbers become very large, very fast.

For companies attacking it though, the space is fragmented and the technology has been evolving alongside what has been inconsistent demand on the part of customers. Some sector shifts, like the move to a programmatic advertising model, which allows brands to automate in advance what ads should run under what conditions, have been expensive to build. Companies like Visible Measures, Smaatoand xAdhave had to raise more backing to do so.

Those challenges, along with cooperating and sometimes competing with YouTube, have made the path to profit tricky to navigate. Rubicon Project Inc. Rocket Fuel Inc. Tremor Video Inc. and Millennial Media advertising technology companies that have gone public during the past two years–have seen their share prices drop anywhere from 42% to 92% since their IPOs. (News Corp. which owns Dow Jones & Co. has stake in Rubicon.)

For Visible Measures, the recent venture financing brings total outside funding to $70 million and will likely be the final infusion from private investors.

“The next milestone is profitable growth,” said General Catalyst’s Mr. Bohn.

Mr. Bohn and Visible Measures Chief Executive and Founder Brian Shin acknowledged the sector was ripe for consolidation, but said there are no current plans to sell the startup. Shin said instead Visible Measures, which sliced headcount earlier this year to around 80, will invest heavily in marketing and selling the product it recently re-built.

Dubbed Fabric, the platform allows brands to distribute their ads to play as sponsored video, pre-roll video, rewards-based and other content delivery methods depending on who is watching and what they saw before. The product marks the next incarnation of Visible Measures, which was founded as a video analytics company to help brands understand what type of video ads are successful and in what context.

Visible Measures counts Ford Motor Co. Proctor Gamble and Microsoft Corp. among its customers.

Mr. Shin said revenue was in “the tens of millions” and the company was now cash-flow neutral. Although he had once planned to go public by now, Mr. Shin said he will wait until the markets are more favorable and Visible Measures has a solid operating track record.

“We have to move from the startup phase to the execution phase. We’ve always been thinking we can do innovative new products that are strategic that don’t have an immediate revenue,” Mr. Shin said. “Now we have the right product and we have to focus like crazy on selling it. We have to think a little bigger and grow up as a company.”