Space is no longer the final frontier for Imaginova, especially after capturing a $15-million third round of funding Wednesday that will enable the company to increase its staff and expand its horizon of content and commerce.

The financing was led by Steelpoint Capital Partners, joined by existing investors RedShift Ventures (formerly known as SpaceVest), Venrock Associates, and Gannett.

Imaginova already sits on a launching pad of seven separate editorial products—three online networks and four print. As part of the company’s push toward content monetization, Imaginova launched an e-commerce platform last quarter to tie its readers to products they’d be interested in purchasing.

“We’re going to teach them through a variety of original content products,” said Imaginova CEO Daniel Stone. “We’re going to sell that audience on behalf of advertisers on one hand, and we’re going to direct them to our e-commerce storefronts on the other.”

Part of the company’s ability to tap into its readers’ spending opportunities stems from the Internet-centric focus throughout its brands.

Not only do the company’s various newsletters, blogs, and commerce systems drive traffic and advertising dollars to the individual portals, they allow Imaginova to generate a firm user database.

In turn, the company sells its core demographic—highly educated, tech-savvy males, ages 25 to 54—to the Microsofts, Fords, and Intels of the advertising world.

“At the end of the day, we have an ever-growing reach into this valuable demographic,” said Mr. Stone.

But astronomy isn’t leading the charge to the bank. While a quick glance at Imaginova’s web site might suggest that galaxies and planets are the company’s predominant focus, it’s actually a disproportionate result of Imaginova’s history.

Space.com’s Evolution

Imaginova launched as Space.com in 1999, with CNN Anchor Lou Dobbs in the captain’s chair as chief executive. When the dot-com bubble burst and almost pulled the company out of the skies, increased venture investment and a strategic rethinking turned the New York City-based company into Imaginova in 2004.

“It turned out that space, as a singular focus, was not a big enough business opportunity to create the type of value we were looking to create as a company,” said Mr. Stone.

The company is currently broadening its editorial and retail offerings to a more generalized science and technology beat, as seen in Imaginova’s 2004 launch of its LiveScience web site.

Consequently, the amount of space coverage will be balanced more with the site’s other focuses as Imaginova—$15 million stronger—starts adding additional content to the mix.

But as Imaginova continues its transition into a shining star of science, it’s tapping into a market full of planetary heavyweights: Discovery, Popular Science, and Scientific American.

Intellectually Curious

The company’s done its research, however. According to a study released by Imaginova and media agency OMD, more than 60 million Americans, or 40 percent of the country, fall within Imaginova’s target audience of “intellectually curious customers.”

To Imaginova, the sheer number of competing brands serves as a measure of the size of the science/technology market, and suggests that there’s still room for the company to grab its own slice of pie.

While seemingly everything the company does faces competition from another direction, Mr. Stone said the crowded landscape is hardly Imaginova’s biggest challenge.

“At this point, capital is a constraint to us growing our share of this market,” he said. “So with this financing, it’s a matter of executing our plan against kind of the secret sauce we’ve learned along the way.”

Contact the writer: DMurphy@RedHerring.com