Synup, a SaaS-based solutions provider on Monday announced it has completed a USD six million worth Series A round of financing, led by Vertex Ventures and Synup's existing investor, Prime Venture Partners.
The investment is projected to help the company rapidly expand its sales and marketing efforts as well as broaden and accelerate product development.
"There is an undisputed need for an automated marketing solution for millions of local businesses across the globe. We are fortunate to have partnered with two top tier investors such as Vertex and Prime, who bring both a deep understanding of our business as well as operational expertise. We have built a unique and cost effective solution and have seen some excellent growth so far and aim to take this to other geographies soon with a wider product offering," said founder and CEO Synup, Ashwin Ramesh.
Following its inception in 2015, Synup achieved USD one million in ARR in the first nine months, and since then, over 50,000 locations in the U.S and Canada have used its solutions. The company has already started to generate a positive cash flow and aims to grow ten-fold in the next three years.
"Synup has been able to solve a difficult problem in a market that is largely underpenetrated. Their strong early customer traction is a testament to the efficacy of their approach to address this massive market opportunity. We have been impressed with the experience of their team and the thoughtful design of their product, and look forward to helping scale this company," said Ben Mathias, Managing Partner, Vertex Ventures.
Currently, local businesses are getting discovered in hundreds of fragmented consumer platforms on the web and mobile. Most of these listings have to be manually updated across all the platforms and it takes approximately eight hours a week for a store manager to just update location data. The listings also do not provide the business with any analytics or insight into user reviews.
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Synup offers a complete local marketing solution that makes it easy for businesses to manage their location data, presence, reputation and analytics. Synup tracks hundreds of thousands of business profiles and monitors millions of interactions to provide businesses with automated marketing as well as insights that they would otherwise not get. It also manages and boosts local SEO efforts for agencies, enterprises and small businesses with multiple locations.
Synup works with both digital agencies and businesses directly to manage their listings on over 50 of the most important local search destinations. Additionally, it tracks customer reviews and analyses rankings on different search engines.
In the next six months, the company wants to go beyond location data management and offer a wider breadth of products to its customers. The company is bullish on its growth as out of the total 28 million local businesses in the US, only about a million (3.57 percent), use automated location-marketing services like Synup.
Currently, the company has over 40 employees and is looking to hire across all sections of the business. Synup plans to expand into Europe and United Kingdom by mid-2018.