Funding led by Vertex Ventures with participation from existing investor, Prime Venture Partners
Synup, a provider of SaaS-based solutions that enables local businesses to manage their online presence has completed a $6 million (approx INR 40 crores) Series A round of financing. The fresh round of investment is led by Vertex Ventures along with Synup’s existing investor, Prime Venture Partners, who also participated in the round. The investment will help the company to rapidly expand its sales and marketing efforts as well as broaden and accelerate product development.
The Series A financing builds on an exceptional year for Synup which saw a rapidly growing roster of clients, and market momentum. Just after its launch in 2015, Synup achieved $1 million in ARR in the first 9 months, and since then over 50,000 locations in the U.S & Canada have used its solutions. The company has already started to generate a positive cash flow and aims to grow 10x in the next 3 years.
Currently, local businesses are getting discovered in hundreds of fragmented consumer platforms on the web & mobile. Most of these listings have to be manually updated across all the platforms and it takes approximately 8 hours a week for a store manager to just update location data. The listings also do not provide the business with any analytics or insight into user reviews.
Synup offers a complete local marketing solution that makes it easy for businesses to manage their location data, presence, reputation and analytics. Synup tracks hundreds of thousands of business profiles & monitors millions of interactions to provide businesses with automated marketing as well as insights that they would otherwise not get. It also manages and boosts local SEO efforts for agencies, enterprises and small businesses with multiple locations. Synup works with both digital agencies and businesses directly to manage their listings on over 50 of the most important local search destinations. Additionally, it tracks customer reviews and analyses rankings on different search engines.
In the next six months, the company wants to go beyond location data management and offer a wider breadth of products to its customers. The company is bullish on its growth as out of the total 28 million local businesses in the US, only about a million (3.57%), use automated location-marketing services like Synup.
Synup’s founder Ashwin Ramesh is a serial entrepreneur having started his first business when he was still in high school. Currently, the company has over 40 employees and is looking to hire across all sections of the business. Synup plans to expand into Europe and United Kingdom by mid – 2018.
Ashwin Ramesh, Founder & CEO, Synup said, “These are exciting times at Synup. There is an undisputed need for an automated marketing solution for millions of local businesses across the globe. We are fortunate to have partnered with two top tier investors such as Vertex and Prime, who bring both a deep understanding of our business as well as operational expertise. We have built a unique and cost effective solution and have seen some excellent growth so far and aim to take this to other geographies soon with a wider product offering.”
Ben Mathias, Managing Partner, Vertex Ventures said, “Synup has been able to solve a difficult problem in a market that is largely underpenetrated. Their strong early customer traction is a testament to the efficacy of their approach to address this massive market opportunity. We have been impressed with the experience of their team and the thoughtful design of their product, and look forward to helping scale this company.”
Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners said, “Prime is thrilled to continue our partnership with Synup. Synup is amongst the first wave of global SaaS companies to come out of India and we are looking forward to being a part of this journey along with Vertex. When we initially invested, Synup was just starting their journey. However, the clarity of vision from Ashwin in understanding both the opportunity and the execution of it left little doubt in our minds that we wanted to back Synup. In two years Synup has achieved rapid customer traction and revenue growth and is well positioned to scale to the next level.”
