Zuberance Raises $8 Million in Series B Round

San Carlos, Calif. (PRWEB) October 26, 2010

Zuberance, provider of an award-winning Word of Mouth marketing platform that energizes Brand Advocates, announced today it has received $ 8 million in Series B funding led by Canaan Partners. Existing investor Emergence Capital Partners and Correlation Ventures also participated in the round.

Zuberance will use the proceeds of its Series B financing to accelerate its growth, further enhance product innovation, and expand sales and marketing. Zuberance is creating and leading the brand advocacy category, said Rob Fuggetta, Zuberance Founder and CEO. This funding will enable Zuberance to leverage our first mover advantage and enable more brands to harness the marketing power of their Brand Advocates, Fuggetta said.

Energizing Brand Advocates

Brand Advocates are consumers and business buyers who frequently recommend brands and products without being paid to do so. Brand Advocates trusted recommendations directly influence billions of dollars of purchase decisions for everything from cars to computers, hotels, restaurants, movies, and more. There are over 50 million Brand Advocates in the U.S., a valuable, highly influential, and yet under-utilized marketing weapon for companies.

The Zuberance Advocate Platform enables companies to identify and energize their Brand Advocates at scale to create and publish positive ratings and reviews, stories, and answers on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon.com, TripAdvisor, Yelp, brand websites, and elsewhere plus share promotional offers with their social networks. Integrated analytics enable marketers to track effectiveness of Brand Advocate programs in real-time plus get unique, actionable insights about Brand Advocates.

10X Return on Advocacy

Companies using the Zuberance platform are getting a 10X Return on Advocacy as measured by qualified leads, traffic, sales, and influence impressions. Conversion rates from Zuberance-powered Word of Mouth/Brand Advocate marketing are 5X to 10X higher than paid search, online advertising, and email marketing, an analysis of Zuberance-powered programs shows.

Major Restaurant Chain Energizes its Brand Advocates

A major restaurant chain is using the Zuberance Advocate Platform to energize hundreds of thousands of its Advocates. In only six months, the restaurants Brand Advocates have:

Urban Airship Announces $5.4 Million Series B Round Led by Foundry Group

Portland, OR (Vocus) November 3, 2010

Urban Airship, the engine behind thousands of the worlds most successful mobile apps, today announced it has closed its Series B funding round in the amount of $ 5.4 million. Urban Airships total venture capital investment of $ 6.5 million will fuel the companys ongoing growth.

The round was led by Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group and is the first investment from Foundry Groups second fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2010, L.P. Additionally, the company announced that Jason Mendelson, Managing Director of Foundry Group, has joined Urban Airships board of directors. True Ventures and Seattle-based Founders Co-op, both of whom participated in Urban Airships Series A investment, announced in February 2010, also joined the Series B round.

Launched in June 2009, Urban Airship has found early success providing mobile developers with tools to optimize their apps, including easy-to-implement products for mobile messaging and content delivery and authorization. To date, Urban Airship has delivered more than 1 billion mobile messages across the Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. Many of the top brands in entertainment, media, publishing and gaming depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile marketing initiatives are profitable and scalable.

Urban Airship really impressed us with its foresight into the mobile market. The team there knows the market better than anyone else and is consistently out in front of what customers want and need, says Mendelson. Urban Airships early traction of securing more than 4 thousand customers sending millions of messages every day and reaching 45 million devices is extremely impressive.

Push Notifications and In-App Purchase Products Fuel Growth

Urban Airships line of real-time messaging products, AirMail, helps businesses significantly increase user engagement with their brand and deliver more value to users by delivering push notifications. AirMail has been big business for Urban Airship since it gained early market traction by powering push notifications for Tapulous runaway hit app, Tap Tap Revenge, the first app in Apples App Store to be enabled with push. Since then, the company has helped popular mobile app publishers such as Universal Entertainment Group, Dictionary.com, LivingSocial, and Gowalla find success and increase revenue from their mobile apps. Most recently, Verizon Wireless named Urban Airship its preferred provider of push notifications across the entire Verizon developer network.

Urban Airships in-app purchase product, StoreFront, provides users with easy one-click purchases through Apples iTunes, thus opening up a new mobile channel for selling existing content. StoreFront also includes functionality to enable subscriptions through the iTunes interface, a much-needed solution to publisher challenges in managing and authenticating user devices for ongoing content access.

Were delighted to see that the Urban Airship team has continued to excel in growing its customer base and product offering, noted Puneet Agarwal, Partner at True Ventures and board member of Urban Airship. The company continues to push the envelope with its innovative real-time messaging products, AirMail and StoreFront, which are squarely meeting the needs of mobile developers and publishers. Were pleased to continue our investment in Urban Airship.

Were excited to announce our funding and to continue collaborating with our existing investors at True Ventures and the Founders Co-op, both of whom have proven to be tremendously helpful. Were looking forward to working with Jason and his team over at the Foundry Group and receiving their strategic guidance and expertise. This new funding will enable us to expand our product offering and footprint, build out our engineering team to meet customer demand and continue our leadership in the market, stated Scott Kveton, co-founder and CEO of Urban Airship.

About Foundry Group

Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage information technology, Internet, and software startups. In addition to providing the necessary venture capital to get a company up and running, Foundry Group is committed to leveraging its experience in starting and growing companies, expertise in the technology industry, and network of relationships to help great entrepreneurs turn great ideas into great companies. Foundry Group is based in Boulder, Colorado, and invests in companies located across the United States. For more information, visit http://www.foundrygroup.com.

About True Ventures

Based in the Silicon Valley, with offices in Palo Alto, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Great Falls, VA, True Ventures invests in promising entrepreneurs at the earliest stages in the highest-growth segments of the technology market. The partners at True Ventures have started over ten companies as founders, and the venture firm is designed by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs. The firm clearly understands both opportunities and challenges in the earliest stage of development and provides young companies with a powerful, seasoned partner. True Ventures has raised two venture capital funds to date and manages $ 375 million in limited partner capital. For more information, visit trueventures.com.

About Founders Co-op

Founder's Co-op is a seed- and early-stage investment partnership based in Seattle. The firm is led by experienced entrepreneurs Andy Sack and Chris DeVore, and invests on behalf of a hands-on limited partnership including more than 20 successful startup veterans. Founder's Co-op helps web and mobile software entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest from the earliest stages of venture formation, with a hands-on approach that emphasizes agility, capital efficiency, creativity and active support from our extended community of investors and portfolio company founders. To learn more, visit founderscoop.com.

About Urban Airship

Urban Airship powers the worlds most successful mobile apps. Providing breakthrough technology, Urban Airship makes mobile marketing far more engaging, effective, and efficient. Top brands depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile app initiatives are scalable and profitable. Verizon, Dictionary.com, Tapulous, and Warner Bros. are just a few of the thousands of companies that utilize Urban Airship's innovative platform to reach and engage target audiences - and increase app revenue streams. Urban Airship puts the power of influence in marketers' hands through push notification, rich messaging, and in-app purchases. The privately held company is based in Portland, Oregon. For more information, interested parties can visit urbanairship.com.

Press Contacts:

Jessica Davis

Urban Airship

C: 503.756.8908

Jessica(at)urbanairship(dot)com

Carmen Hughes

Ignite Public Relations

W: 650.227.3280 ext. 1

C: 650.576.6444

Carmen(at)ignitepr(dot)com

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SS8 Raises $12.5 Million to Accelerate Product Development and Expand Distribution

Milpitas, CA (PRWEB) November 30, 2010

SS8, the leading US-based provider of lawful communications interception and forensics solutions today announced the closing of a $ 12.5 million Series B equity financing. New investor, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, joined existing investors, Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group, ONSET Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, W Capital Partners, and Woodside Fund in the round. The successful financing attracted investment from all existing shareholders as well as several new parties--a testament to the expanding market opportunity and the increasing global attention on communication analysis to help combat crime and terrorism. This financing represents the second round of funding since SS8 repositioned itself; focusing solely on meeting global demand for cyber-security products and solutions.

With more than twenty-five years of security expertise, Novak Biddle Venture Partners co-founder and general partner, Roger Novak, will join SS8s Board of Directors. SS8 offers a unique combination of telecom-technology expertise, plus more than a dozen years experience working with both service providers and government law enforcement agencies in delivering field-proven lawful interception and cyber monitoring solutions, said Novak. Our investment, and the continued commitment from existing investors, reflects our confidence in SS8s ability to execute on their strategy to deliver end-to-end interception and analysis solutions.

SS8s end-to-end communication interception and forensics solutions manage the provisioning, acquisition, and delivery of intercepted network traffic and related call data to monitoring-center applications at law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Fully compliant with ETSI and CALEA interception and monitoring standards, more than 250 SS8 systems have been deployed globally for all major types of communications including wireline, wireless, IMS, cable, WiFi, WiMAX, LTE, VoIP and broadband IP data. The additional funding will allow SS8 to keep pace with technology developments required to support ever-increasing Internet bandwidth and myriad IP communication applications and protocols as they emerge and evolve.

New web-based communication applications such as webmail and social media have greatly increased the complexity of, and demand for, our interception and forensics solutions, said Dennis Haar, SS8 President and CEO. This round of funding will allow us to accelerate development and expand sales channels for state-of-the-art security solutions; helping governments around the world protect personal safety and national security.

About SS8 Headquartered in the heart of the Silicon Valley in Milpitas, California, SS8 is an independent global provider of regulatory-compliant electronic surveillance solutions. The companys solutions are currently deployed in over 25 countries at the largest wire-line, wireless, cable, VoIP and satellite service providers, supporting more than 500 million subscribers. These voice and data communications intercept solutions serve local, regional and national law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide. SS8 products are sold and supported both directly and through OEM partnerships.

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