WiFi Hotspots Prove Mobile Ad Gold Mine, JiWire Raises $20M
JiWire, a provider of mobile and location-based marketing solutions, announced it has raised $20 million in a third round of funding. The round was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based Trident Capital, and existing investors Comcast Interactive Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Norwest Venture Partners and Panorama Capital also participated in the financing.
“As part of its investment, Trident Capital’s John Moragne will join the JiWire board. John co-founded Trident Capital and was recently named to Forbes’ Midas list of the 100 most powerful VCs. He brings a wealth of expertise in location and advertising through his involvement in companies such as MapQuest, Homeaway and Turn.”
This latest round brings JiWire’s total capital raised to $45 million, and follows the growth the company has seen lately, which currently serves about 40 million users per month.
According to JiWire’s tests, its click-through rates are three times greater than regular online ads, and it’s seems this also managed to appeal to the company’s latest partner. JiWire just teamed up with Groupon to offer its deals via its location-based ads, expanding the reach of the daily deals giant even further. JiWire and Groupon will share ad revenue, which is generated from ads displayed whenever JiWire users are nearby businesses promoted by Groupon.
A bit earlier, JiWire entered into an agreement with HarborLink to display its location-based ads to the public WiFi networks operator’s users.
The location-based market is an accelerating one, which gains more and more users by the day. There multiple aspects to this market including location-based search, and Local.com decidced to strengthen its investment in this field with the acquisition of Krillion for $3.5 million. Both Local.com and Krillion provide search results based on users’ locations.
Everything involved with location data has been under a lot of scrutiny lately. This is especially true for Apple and its mobile OS, which the company updated in an effort to address some of the concerns raised around unsecure location data storage.
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