Synup, a Banglore based startup which provides SaaS solutions to help small and local businesses manage their online presence has raised $6 million in a Series A funding round led by Vertex Ventures. Its seed investor, Prime Venture Partners also participated in the financing round.
Synup will use the newly acquired financing to expand its marketing and sales efforts. A part of the amount will also go in the development of their product. The company is planning to grow three times the current size in next three years. The company said that it aims to further expand its horizon into Europe and the UK by the end of the year 2018.
Synup says that its solution is used in over 50,000 locations across USA and Canada. When it was founded in 2013, it started off as an online business listing provider. Since then, it has developed its data matching platform algorithm and assisted local business organizations to identify incorrect postings, improve their online presence and promote and manage user reviews. It has been working with 50 major online platforms including Google, Facebook, Yelp, Apple, Yellow Pages. Synup helps small business organizations like spas, fitness centres, bakeries by registering them on popular listing websites like Craiglist and JustDial. It allows businesses to remotely update their information across a bunch of listing sites. For automation of marketing and leads, it tracks thousands of business profiles online and monitors their interaction with the customers.
Majority of its clients are from USA and Canada. Though India has a plethora of small and local businesses, Synup is currently not available in India. However, it is planning to dig its roots in the country once the local businesses develop a zest for online marketing. Acharya of Prime Ventures thinks that advent of Jio will help the internet to penetrate deeper and in around 2-3 years, local businesses in India would resort to online marketing.
One of the biggest rivals of Synup in the US is Yext. Yext recently went public and raised $115.5 million in April. A few of its other competitors are NinjaCat, Raven Tools, UpCity.
