ThingLink is an interactive media platform that lets over 2.5 million publishers, educators, and marketers create engaging content by adding rich media links to photos, videos, 360 content, and VR. The company’s core product is a SaaS annotation tool evolving from image and video annotation to 360 content and mobile VR, enabling publishers to create custom immersive experiences. ThingLink tracks user motions within virtual stories and provides creators with key performance metrics to measure engagement in 360 environments. It plans to use the newly raised funds to expand its SaaS offering to virtual reality annotation and is preparing to launch a beta VR editor with key partners that lets users add contextual layers such as text, photos, maps, video and call-to-action tags. The VR experiences do not require a separate application and can be viewed over mobile browsers with headsets like Google Cardboard and Zeiss VR One. The company has offices in Palo Alto, New York, Helsinki, and St Petersburg and closed a $1.3M funding round. ThingLink provides a tool that turns static images into interactive, shoppable content by adding in-image hotspots that launch videos, social links or third-party apps. The platform has attracted publishers and brands such as Vogue, Home Depot, Mercedes‑Benz, Atlantic Records and major news organizations, and counts more than 220,000 publishers. For enterprise customers ThingLink charges $500–$1,500 per month on annual subscriptions and runs campaign pricing based on views (typically a few hundred to a few thousand dollars). Engagement metrics cited include roughly 10% average click-throughs for lifestyle campaigns and over 50% for music campaigns; roughly half of views now come from mobile. ThingLink launched a mobile app to let consumers build ThingLinks and integrates with Twitter Cards; the company is positioning mobile as a primary viewing destination. Leadership changes and hires accompany the product push: CEO Ulla Engeström is relocating to New York and a sales team is being built under CRO Hillary Billingsley while engineering remains in Helsinki. ThingLink’s core product lets users add rich media tags (hotspots) to images that reveal links, playable audio/video and other content on hover or click. Tags can link to services including Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Eventbrite, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, SoundCloud, Spotify and Wikipedia, or simply display text/URLs. Images are embeddable and shareable, and the back-end offers a real-time analytics engine that tracks image- and tag-level views, hovers and clicks. The format has seen traction with music labels, artist promoters (including TopSpin), publishers such as The Guardian, and other use cases like commerce, fashion, education and design; a deal with another major music-industry company was said to be in the works. ThingLink launched in June and showed at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley; the company highlights strong CTRs (typical averages 1.5%–20%, with some campaigns above 50%) compared with standard banner-ad rates. The startup is Helsinki- and U.S.-based and has hired several former Nokia engineers. Founded by design blogger Ulla‑Maaria Engeström, Thinglink began by defining a standard for identifying virtual and physical objects and linking them to information on the Internet. It evolved into a social catalogue enabling designers, brands and consumers to identify and converse around products. Today the company positions itself as a tool for online publishers to add interactive images via special tags that make objects clickable and drive traffic to e‑commerce sites. Thinglink provides real‑time statistics for publishers to track views, hovers and clicks on tagged images, and existing partners include Aller, YLE and Artek. The startup raised $1 million in seed funding and says the funds will be used to develop an in‑image advertising network for brands, retailers and other product advertisers. The company has hired former Nokia engineer Janne Jalkanen as CTO, and Jyri Engestrom serves as an adviser.

Total raised

$7M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Feb 2016