Locality, formerly Centzy, is a local search engine that aggregates pricing, hours, services, reviews and ratings for nearby businesses. It uses a proprietary crowdsourcing platform and outbound phone calls to collect data many small businesses don’t publish online, and pulls reviews from Yelp for matching listings. The startup covers 10,000 U.S. cities, lists 60 services across 15 categories, and reports over 1.5 million monthly users; two-thirds of traffic is mobile and one-third of consumers engage with a merchant onsite after searching. Locality launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2012 and has rebranded to focus on making every local business searchable online. As part of the rebrand it is moving its headquarters to San Francisco and will maintain a satellite office in New York. Company leadership positions Locality as "the Kayak for local services" and says it may expand into transactions and bookings in the future. Centzy operates a local search/productivity service that brings detailed business data—prices, hours, ratings and specials—for convenience‑oriented merchants online. The company has built a database of roughly 400,000 local business listings and recently expanded to the top 10 U.S. metro areas. Consumer traffic is growing ~25% month-over-month and is already 60% mobile even before the company has released mobile apps. Centzy’s current user base skews 18–44, female, with above‑average income and a sizable minority representation. Product plans include nationwide rollout, consumer mobile apps later this year, and merchant‑facing tools for businesses to edit listings, post ads and run lead‑gen services. About 15% of listed businesses already run specials via the service; pricing for merchant services has not yet been set. Centzy operates a web and mobile search engine that uses a crowdsourcing platform to pull offline pricing and open-hours data that web crawlers cannot access. It combines that pricing and hours data with review information from Yelp and CitySearch APIs to rank local businesses by value. At launch it covers 15 business types across San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City and lets users sort by price, distance, open hours, and average rating. The company raised $800,000 in seed funding from ff Venture Capital and Lightbank and opened at TechCrunch Disrupt. Founders Jay Shek and Jeremy Clemenson took Centzy through the Entrepreneurs Roundtable and have made New York City their home base. Centzy plans to expand to the top 10 U.S. markets by this fall, go nationwide in 2013, and is seeking additional funding to hire developers and build its product and team; potential monetization paths include charging for purchases made through its search, monetizing the crowdsourcing platform, or selling access to its price database.

Total raised

$7M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Nov 2013