Yext Launches Realtime Reputation Management System For Local Businesses

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Yext, a popular local business search engine, debuted Yext Calls last year at TechCrunch50, which is sort of like a Google Voice for businesses. Yext allows local businesses to use its software to process incoming phone calls and organize them based on what was said during the conversation. This gives businesses the ability to search or browse through the transcripts and calls at any point. Based on keywords that occurred in the call, the software can detect that e.g. price estimates were requested for a car repair or which part of what type of vehicle the caller was having problems with exactly.

But Yext says that in the realtime web, it’s tough to manage your reputation as a business. So the startup is launching a realtime reputation manager for local businesses. It will claim your local business listing on sites like Citysearch, Yelp, YellowPages, Twitter, Facebook and more. The site will pull reviews for a local business on all these sites, a track each review for positive ore negative feedback.

Businesses can Tweet directly from the management app, manage their Facebook fan page and can access visitor check-ins on Foursquare. Yext’s reputation dashboard is also integrated with its other features. The dashboard will be free for businesses for now. Yext says that local is vertical, and is not a big, broad market. For example for a local gym, the dashboard will source buzz from fitness site as well as social media.

The startup, which was set to generate $20 million in revenues in 2009, just raised $25 million in Series B funding.

Yext will face competition from ReputationDefender, and a number of other social media tracking services for businesses.

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Company: Yext
Website: yext.com
Launch Date: September 16, 2006
Funding: $65.8M

Yext is the market-leading location software company that lets businesses update and sync their location data everywhere. Tens of thousands of businesses, including 10 of the Fortune 100 use Yext to update their location data and instantly sync it on dozens of search engines, mobile apps, ad platforms, and their own sites. Yext – Update Once. Updates Everywhere. Yext is located in New York, NY.

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