Many brands now rely on location-based marketing, which sends consumers ads based on which stores or venues are nearby. Founded by former Googlers, Ubimo incorporates additional data points, including weather and local events, to make ads more relevant and result in higher conversion rates.
Based in Tel Aviv, the startup recently closed a $7.5 million Series B led by Pitango Venture Capital, with participation from OurCrowd and YJ Capital (the venture capital arm of Yahoo Japan, which is investing for the first time in Israel).
This brings the total Ubimo has raised to $9.7 million. TechCrunch last covered the company when it scored its first funding back in August 2013. A few months after that, Ubimo launched its platform in the U.S. market and opened a sales office in New York to work with ad agencies and Fortune 500 brands.
Co-founder Ran Ben-Yair (who also launched LabPixies, which was acquired by Google in 2010) says Ubimo will use its latest capital to scale up its platform and build its global clientele.
Ubimo’s software-as-a-service platform allows companies to manage ad placements by looking at factors that might influence each consumer’s purchasing decisions, such as nearby venues, events, the weather, and neighborhood demographics such as the ages and gender of people most likely to patronize different services and businesses. For example, if someone goes to a lot of baseball games, Ubimo might send them ads about sales at nearby sports equipment stores.
As people get used to receiving location-based promotions, Ubimo can help advertisers help stand out from the increasing barrage of notifications on smartphone screens.
Ben-Yair says that any self-service or location-based marketing platform can be considered a potential competitor, but Ubimo’s use of different data creates more precise campaigns.
“We think that our unique real-time context approach is much more effective in mobile marketing than traditional static user profiles,” he says. “In addition, we offer a full solution to the advertiser, combining both data and media platforms in one solution, eliminating the need to split efforts and resources, making insights actionable in real-time.”
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