Uberall, the Berlin-headquartered startup that has developed a cloud-based platform to let small and large businesses get listed and market themselves across multiple location-based services, has picked up $25 million in Series B funding.
Leading the round is HPE Growth Capital, who join existing investors that include Project A, and United Internet. The company says it will use the new capital for product development and international expansion, including a focus on the U.S. where Uberall already has an office in San Francisco.
Founded in 2013 by David Federhen, Florian Hübner, and Josha Benner, Uberall offers a Software-as-a-Service for SMEs and larger companies (who have multiple stores) to manage their various location marketing across all of the various platforms, from search and directories, to maps and sat-nav.
In a call with Uberall co-CEO Hübner, he said this includes getting your shop or store listed on all of the supported services via a single submission and control centre. This spans search engines and local directories such as Google, Where To?, Scoot, 192, Opendi, and Hotfrog, and online maps such as Bing, Google Maps, HERE (ex. Nokia) and Apple Maps.
Social products that have a location element are also supported, including Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, and Instagram. As are Navigation services, such as Uber, Waze, and in-car sat navs (mostly powered through HERE), Navmii, and TomTom.
To manage all of these individually is a lot of work and prohibitively time consuming, which is the first problem Uberall set out to solve. This also includes helping to inject as much structured data as possible into each of the 100 or so supported services e.g. location, opening times, menu items, facilities etc., which is non-trivial since there isn’t a standard format for all data.
However, explained Hübner, beyond listing a business, the SaaS has since developed to be a full suite of location marketing features that also supports managing engagement in the form of reviews and ratings — including, most importantly, responding to customer feedback, which also contributes to how prominently a business is listed. And once you’ve got your business properly listed and are able to manage your presence, Uberall has a location-based advertising product, too.
This sees placing location-based adds made a lot easier, especially for smaller businesses who don’t have a budget to employ a campaign manager or it wouldn’t be cost effective in terms of ROI to do so. In other words, come to Uberall for the listings and engagement management and stay for the location-based advertising. The startup charges a per month fee per business location.
To date, Uberall says it counts a range of well-known clients from different industries as customers, including Domino’s, DHL Group, Vodafone, IHG, Deutsche Telekom, Thyssenkrupp, HUK Coburg, and Douglas. In addition, the SaaS is being used by SMEs, increasingly via the distribution partnerships it has with 1&1 Internet, Swisscom, Sensis, Vendasta, and OVH.