Zoove raises $13 million

Mobile marketing company to roll out its platform across major US carriers

Zoove, a mobile marketing company, announced the first close of a $13 million Series C funding round.  Investors include Highland Capital Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Cardinal Capital Partners.  Zoove has raised a total of $35.9 million in funding to date.

The Palo Alto, Ca.-based company delivers mobile direct response marketing services in the US.  It's a call to action form of marketing where Zoove gives brands a way to communicate with potential consumers through phone calls, slightly different from other companies like 4Info, which enable brands to interact with consumers via text messaging.  

A real case scenario of how Zoove functions can be see through its StarStar marketing service.  For example, somebody could see some sort of display advertisement which says something like, "to see more dial ** MOVIE."  If interested, that person would dial that number and could receive some sort of interactive content, like an SMS with more information, but not limited to rich multimedia, like a trailer for the movie, which Zoove said it can deliver.  Zoove argues its StarStar service is more efficient than texting for a number of reasons, one of them being that texting is time consuming (requires an average of 23 key strokes), whereas the average number of keystrokes with StarStar is only seven.

Zoove is planning to aggressively grow.  Tim Jemison, CEO and Co-founder of Zoove said in a statement, "With this new round of funding Zoove will move forward to roll out the abbreviated dialing mobile direct response marketing platform across the major US carriers,"  although none of the carriers were stated yet.  Zoove said it has support from operators, brands and advertisers.  On its site, Zoove shows it has worked with publishers like Fox Sports, MTV, BET, and CNN, naming a few.