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Uberall raises $115M, acquires MomentFeed to scale up its location marketing services – TechCrunch

3 Mins read

Location-based services may have had their day as a salient category for hot apps or innovative tech leveraging the arrival of smartphones, but that’s mainly because they are now part of the unspoken fabric of how we interact with digital services every day: We rely on location-specific information when we are on search engines when we are using maps or weather apps when we are taking and posting photos and more. Still, there remain a lot of gaps in how location information links up with accurate information. So today, a company that’s made it it’s business to address that is announcing some funding as it scales up its service.

Overall, which works with retailers and other brick-and-mortar operators to help them update and provide more accurate information about themselves across the plethora of apps and other services consumers use to discover them, is announcing $115 million in funding. Alongside that, the Berlin startup is making an acquisition: it’s buying MomentFeed, a location marketing company based out of Los Angeles, to continue scaling its business. The funding is being led by London-based investor Bregal Milestone, with Level Equity, United Internet, and Uberall management also participating. From what we understand from sources, the funding values Uberall at around $500 million, and the deal for MomentFeed was made for between $50 million and $60 million.

Uberall

The business combination is building way more scale into the platform: Uberall said that together they would manage the online presence for 1.35 million business locations, making the company the biggest in the field, with customers including the gas station operator BP, KFC, clothes, and food chain Marks and Spencer, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. In an interview, Florian Hübner, the CEO and co-founder of Uberall, noted that the companies have a lot of overlap. Before the deal, the companies worked together closely in the U.S. market. Still, all the same, MomentFeed has built some specific techniques that will enrich the more comprehensive platform, such as a powerful tool for measuring sentiment analysis.

“Managing the online presence” is not a company’s website nor its apps, but it may nevertheless be its most common digital touchpoint when engaging with consumers online. It includes how those companies appear on local listings services like Yelp or TripAdvisor, mapping apps like GooGoogle’swhich provide listings information like addresses and opening hours, and customer reviews — or social apps or location-based advertising. Altogether, when considering a company with multiple locations and the multiple touchpoints a consumer might use, it ends up being a complicated mess of places that must be managed and kept up to date.

“We” are the catalyst for this extensive ecosystem where we enable the brands to use everything the other tech platforms offer in the best possible way,” H, “beer told me. Meanwhile, the tech platforms are willing to work with middleware companies like Uberall to make the information on their services more accurate and complete by connecting with businesses when they have not managed to do so directly. (And if youyou’veer been caught out by the wrong opening times on a Google Maps entry or any other access or piece of information elsewhere, you know this is an issue.)

And, of course, expecting any company with potentially hundreds of locations to provide the correct details without a tool is also a non-starter. “Ca “rally updating 100,000 profiles is super hard,” H” burner said. It also provides services to update information about the vaccine and COVID-19 testing clinics and other essential services that contend with the same variations in location, opening hours, and customer feedback as any other business on a site like Google Maps. Altogether, Uberall has built a platform that essentially connects up all of those endpoints. An Uber customer can use a dashboard to provide updates that populate automatically everywhere and read and respond to reviews.

Conversely, Uberall also looks for instances where a company is unofficially represented or misrepresented and locks those down. It has also built a location-based marketing service serving ads for its customers. It is somewhat akin to social media management tools, which let you manage social media accounts and marketing campaigns, except that it covers a much more fragmented and disparate set of places where a company might appear online. The bigger picture here is that just as location-based marketing is a fragmented business, it provides services to manage it. This move reduces that field and improves the efficiency of scaling such services.

“As” we saw the market trending towards consolidation, we considered several potential companies to merge with. Uberall was our most preferred” s,” id MomentFeed CEO Nick Hedges in a statement. “Th” s combination makes enormous strategic sense for our customers, who represent the who who’s-who leading U.S. omnichannel brands. It helps accelerate our already rapid pace of innovation, giving customers an even greater edge in the hyper-competitive world of N’ r Me’Me’rketing.” A “ter the deal closes, Hedges will become UbeUberall’sief strategy officer and EVP for North America.

“We” are thrilled to partner with the Uberall team for this next growth phase. Our strategic investment will significantly accelerate UbeUberall’sbition to become the leading ‘Near Me’ Customer Experience platform worldwide. UbeUberall’sfferentiated full-suite solution is unsurpassed by competition regarding integration and functionality, providing customers with a natural edge to reach, interact with, and convert online customers. We look forward to supporting Florian, Nick, and their talented team to deliver on their exciting innovation and expansion roadmap,” s” id Cyrus Shey, managing partner of Bregal Milestone, in a statement.

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