Editor's note: Our Splash Health, Wellness and Wearables event is coming up on March 23 in San Francisco. We'll have Mario Schlosser (Founder & CEO of Oscar Health), Brian Singerman (Partner, Founders Fund), Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), J. Craig Venter (Human Longevity), Lynne Chou (Partner, Kleiner Perkins), Michael Dixon (Sequoia Capital), Patrick Chung (Xfund), Check out the full lineup and register for tickets before they jump! If you want to invest as little as $2500 in our startup winners, join the Vator Investment Club (VIC).
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The Internet has been great for businesses in terms of getting their information out to their customers in greater speed than ever before. After a while, though, it's gotta be just too hard to keep all of that information up to date. There are just too many things to update!
That's how Yext helps: the New York City-based company lets marketers and businesses synchronize their data, including information about local content, listings, store pages, social pages, and campaigns, across different platforms, including local search services, as well as their own websites.
Businesses can manage their digital knowledge in the cloud and sync it to over 100 services, including Apple Maps, Bing, Cortana, Facebook, Google, Google Maps, Instagram, Siri and Yelp.
"Digital knowledge is the structured information that a business wants to make publicly accessible. For example, in food service, the address, phone number or menu details of a restaurant; in healthcare, the health insurances accepted by a physician or the precise drop-off point of the emergency room at a hospital campus; or in finance, the ATM locations, retail bank holiday hours or insurance agent biographies. We believe a business is the ultimate authority on its own digital knowledge, and it is our mission to put that business in control of it everywhere," the company wrote in its recently filed S-1 to the SEC.
The company makes its money by offering a subscription service to its businesses, with contracts that are, typically, one year but can be three years or longer.
"Revenues are a function of the number of customers, the number of locations at each customer, the edition, or for older contracts, number of features, to which each customer subscribes, the price of the edition or the feature set and renewal rates," the company says.
Customers include AutoZone, Ben & Jerry's, Best Buy, Citi, Denny's, Farmers Insurance Group, H&R Block, HCA, Infiniti, Marriott, Michael's, McDonald's and Rite Aid.
Yext features pricing on its website, which includes four different plans.
It has a 28 percent optimization rate, and allows for listings on sites that include eLocal, MerchantCircle, Topix and CitySquares.
It has a 28 percent optimization rate, and allows for listings on sites that include Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Bing, Apple and Yelp.
It has a 100 percent optimization rate, and allows for listings on Yext's full Essential package, as well as its fill Emerging Package. In addition, it also features PowerListings+, which allows them to publish products, services, calendars, staff bios and menus. It also comes with analytics.
It has a 100 percent optimization rate, and allows for listings on Yext's full package. It also comes with review monitoring, so businesses can track ratings and reviews, as well as Yext Pages, which lets businesses ad enhanced content to their website.
For its fiscal years ending January 31, 2015 and 2016, Yext's revenues were $60 million and $89.7 million, respectively, a grow rate of 49.5 percent year-over-year. At the same time, Yext's net loss grew from $17.3 million and $26.5 million, a 53 percent increase.
The majority of Yext's revenue goes to sales and marketing, which cost the company $49.8 billion in 2016.
Founded in 2006, Yext started life as a pay-per-call ad business, which it eventually spun out as Felix. As the company started investing more in its online listing business, it sold off Felix to CityGrid Media in August 2012. The money it received was used to further fund the current version of Yext.
The company raised more than $117 million in venture funding, most recently a $50 million round in June of 2014, which valued the company at $520 million. Investors includes Insight Venture Partners, Marker LLC, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and Sutter Hill Ventures.
(Image source: yext.com)
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Founded in 2006, Yext is the next Yellow Pages, offering superior local services to users, advertisers and publishers. Nearly 20,000 customers are now connected to Yext Calls, the company's flagship advertising service that sends local businesses pay-per-action phone calls. Dozens of leading publishers have installed Yext Numbers, the company's local search monetization system. Yext is fanatically focused on perfecting the local advertising experience, an enormous unsolved problem with incredible potential.
Our Mission
Our mission is to produce the best local search results everywhere.
Today, people use hundreds of different sources for local information. If you wanted to find a spa, you might check Google, Yahoo!, Bing, SpaFinder.com, Yelp, MapQuest, TomTom Navigation, Foursquare and that's just the beginning. To provide you with this information, each of these local search tools has its own database that stores basic listing data like business name, address, and phone number, and enhanced information like pictures, descriptions, promotions and more. Since each source has its own database, there are 100s of databases of local information out there. But the problem is, they are totally disconnected, and whenever data changes, they quickly fall out of sync. In fact, on average, 6% of listings change each month, and the end result is that more than 20% of local search return factually incomplete information to end users. The end result is very frustrating for businesses and users.
Yext PowerListings solves this huge problem by centralizing local search results across all those different sites with one system. It lets large and small businesses centrally control information across platforms, producing the best local search results for users everywhere. PowerListings helps businesses appear in the most possible local searches withguaranteed presence, stand out and look great with enhanced content like photos, descriptions, and real-time promotions in their listings, and track it all with full analytics. PowerListings is the only system with any of these features, and the results are awesome.
The PowerListings model is a "triple win" for businesses, publishers and users. Businesses get the most out of local search, publishers get compensated to accept great content, and users get the best information. Everybody wins.
Over 30,000 businesses use PowerListings to get the most out of local search every day.
Learn about our PowerListings Network, our state-of-the art network that updates information at blazing speeds.
Learn more about how PowerListings can help your small business get the most out of local search.
Learn more about how PowerListings can help your brand get the most out of local search.
We think big, we learn fast – and we get stuff done. We are powered by an incredibly talented group of employees who work to produce the best local search information everywhere.
We are hiring the best and brightest to come join us on our mission. Check out our open positions.
We are fortunate to be backed by some of the best investors in the world – Sutter Hill Ventures (Palo Alto, CA),Institutional Venture Partners (Menlo Park, CA), and WGI investments (New York, NY). Yext was founded in 2006 by Howard Lerman, Brian Distelburger and Brent Metz, and is located in New York, NY.
