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Mobile app marketing software firm Fiksu lands $10M [Emirates News Agency (WAM) (United Arab Emirates)](Emirates News Agency (WAM) (United Arab Emirates) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Boston-based mobile app marketing software firm Fiksu announced Tuesday it has secured $10 million in debt funding from Silicon Valley Bank, bringing total funding to date to more than $27 million. The money will be used to continue to support further global expansion and ongoing development for the company's programmatic mobile demand platform, according to a release. Fiksu's software, which uses predictive analytics and other information for enterprises to get the most out of their mobile app advertising campaigns, has been used by brands including Dunkin' Donuts, Groupon, Coca-Cola and Cheetos. Fiksu's success has been largely attributed to the increase in mobile technologies that are being used in many ways by enterprises worldwide, said Kathy Pattison, the company's vice president of marketing, in a previous interview. If you look at the industry in which we play, there's no lack of data pointing to the phenomenal growth of mobile app industry itself, Pattison said in an interview. Mobile has really exploded. The company has added more than 100 employees this year, bringing employee count to 300. The company employs 208 in Boston and is doubling its office space here. The company also recently opened new offices in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles and expects to continue aggressively expanding its global workforce in the coming year, according to a release. This has been a banner year of domestic and international growth, marquee customer wins and unprecedented revenue milestones for Fiksu, said Kenneth Goldman, Fiksu's CFO, in a statement. This financing enables us to continue to capitalize on the burgeoning market opportunities before us, and the partnership with Silicon Valley Bank—with its proven history of success working with high tech innovators—will certainly help us to reach our expansive growth goals. Fiksu has promoted more than 2,300 apps which have been downloaded over 2.7 billion times, according to the company. The company started out as a mobile app developer in 2008, around the same time that the Apple App Store debuted and the mobile app operating software was open to third-party development. Micah Adler, Fiksu's founder and CEO and a former computer science professor at UMass Ahmherst, launched a news aggregation mobile app in June 2009. Realizing that the app's popularity wasn't enough to sustain itself as a profitable business, Adler developed software tools that combined predictive analytics and several algorithms to optimize marketing campaigns. Previous investors in the company include Charles River Ventures (now known as CRV) and Qualcomm Ventures. (c) 2014 Emirates News Agency (WAM) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info). |