LocalResponse is a New York-based social advertising platform that targets ads and marketing campaigns based on social network signals and check-ins. It sells to national brands and agencies and helps retarget social signals across mobile, tablet, and desktop display ads. The company has run campaigns for Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Walgreens and works with 125 advertisers. As of last summer it was delivering about 7 billion impressions per month. LocalResponse is almost at profitability and is on a $10 million annual run rate, and founder Nihal Mehta says he hopes to triple that by the end of the year. LocalResponse aggregates explicit and implicit check-ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram and dozens of other services to help local businesses identify influential customers. Its proprietary technology analyzes the Twitter firehose, photos and natural language to find intent-focused signals (e.g., “I’m headed to ShakeShack”) and prioritizes them for outreach. Businesses can reply to those check-ins with canned or custom marketing messages, coupons or promotions; LocalResponse limits outreach to no more than one message per user every seven days. In a six-month private beta in New York City the company ran over 2,000 campaigns, reporting average link click-through rates of ~60% and 15–20% redemption rates. The product launches with roughly 500,000 pre-indexed businesses and offers a free tier today, with a planned freemium model and a separate brand-and-agency platform in development. Financially, LocalResponse closed $1.5 million in funding in December and intends to raise a larger round in the summer.

Total raised

$3M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Feb 2013