OwnLocal is an
Austin, Texas
Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...
-based
digital advertising startup
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...
founded in 2010.
History
Lloyd Armbrust and Jason Novek founded Seeing Interactive in 2010.
Backed by
seed accelerator Y-Combinator, the company launched as a service for
local newspaper
A newspaper is a Periodical literature, periodical publication containing written News, information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as poli ...
,
TV, and
Radio station
Radio broadcasting is the broadcasting of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based rad ...
s.
After its launch, the startup raised $1 million in seed funding from various investors, including Lerer Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and angel investors
Joshua Schachter and
Paul Buchheit
Paul T. Buchheit (born November 7, 1977) is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created the email service Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former ...
.
The company changed its name to OwnLocal in March 2011.
In October 2011, OwnLocal received an undisclosed amount from a funding round led by
Automattic
Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company most notable for WordPress.com and its contributions to the WordPress system. The company was founded in 2005.
Automattic's brands and products include WordPress.com, Akismet, Gra ...
, the developer of
WordPress
WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...
.
The incubator
500 Startups also participated in the funding. The round raised the company's total funding to $2 million.
OwnLocal was one of the first
for-profit companies to receive funding from the Knight Enterprise Fund, a fund for media innovation.
The company also received an equity investment in February 2013 from Digital First Ventures for an undisclosed amount.
Acquisitions
In May 2014, OwnLocal
acquired Whoosh Traffic.
Whoosh Traffic was an Austin-based company that powered SEO reporting for large
Fortune 500 companies and small businesses. Whoosh was backed by
Techstars, 500 Startups, and several other major technology investors.
OwnLocal acquired Sidengo on March 10, 2015.
Sidengo was an easy-to-use website builder for people with no design or technical skills. Sidengo was started in
Monterrey, Mexico
Monterrey (, , abbreviated as MtY) is the capital and largest city of the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo León. It is the ninth-largest city and the second largest metropolitan area, after Greater Mexico City. Located at the foothills of th ...
by Jorge González and Gabriel Garza.
As of March 2015, OwnLocal had integrated the Sidengo technology into their platform and planned to distribute the technology to their media partners.
OwnLocal acquired Inbound Press in March 2016. Inbound Press was created in Orange County, California by Andrew McFadden. The company's flagship product, Smart Media Kit, is a proven process that generates new advertising leads for newspapers. OwnLocal had added Smart Media Kit to its product offerings as of June 2016.
In 2017, OwnLocal acquired Wanderful Media.
References
{{reflist, 33em
Marketing companies established in 2010
Companies based in Austin, Texas
Advertising agencies of the United States
Y Combinator companies