Pressly, a startup which automatically transforms websites into mobile-friendly versions, has formally launched to the public.

The Toronto-based company has also raised $1.5 million in outside funding from iNovia Capital (News – Alert) and OMERS Venture.

Although Pressly has finally opened its doors to the public, it’s been operating under the radar for a couple of years since its founding. The technology has already powered the mobile site of The Toronto Star.

The Economist Group also built an internal application called Media Lab with the platform.

Pressly is aimed at traditional publications like newspapers that want to establish a mobile site quickly. It converts content from RSS feeds into HTML5-compliant sites geared toward tablets and smartphones. The mobile versions behave much they way apps do, allowing for actions such as swiping for navigating the site.

The company is also shifting content toward marketing, seeing Pressly as a useful tool for lead generation.

“The big opportunity for marketers is the same as the opportunity for publishers,” Pressly marketing director Tobin Dalrymple told TechCrunch. “We studied the impact we had on our clients, and they saw 22 pageviews per visit, and a bounce rate down to 4 percent, which is well over 10 times the industry benchmarks.”

One company already using Pressly for marketing is Ziff-Davis, which built a marketing campaign for IBM (News – Alert) around big data.

Dalrymple said the focus on marketers was one thing that helps Pressly stand out from the competition. The other is that it doesn’t endanger their customers’ revenue streams.

“We are not building an ad network,” he explained. “This is a SaaS (News – Alert) product, where we are providing a platform where we don’t interfere with [publishers’] own revenue models.”

Pressly’s focus on the enterprise is symbolized by its new COO, Ian Richmond, who has worked at Macromedia, Adobe, IBM and Microsoft (News – Alert).