One-year-old startup Synup Inc, that enables local businesses to manage their web presence for marketing and operates out of Bangalore, has raised a $0.5 million (Rs 3 crore) seed round of funding led by a startup incubator and investor Angelprime Partners.
The funding will be used to build operations and expand the team. The company also aims to embark on an aggressive overseas expansion plan with the money.
Co-founded in mid-2013 by 23-year-old Ashwin Ramesh while he was running his first online advertising company OrganicApex, Synup was in itself an experiment.
“We founded Synup after being frustrated with solutions in local marketing that just did not work. Our initial goal was to create software that could solve the problems we were facing ourselves,” the company says on its website.
Ashwin turned an entrepreneur when he was just 15, by starting his own back-end online marketing and web services firm Ebusiness Initiative. He then went on to build OrganicApex, a digital marketing firm which deals with web services, products, properties and more.
The other co-founders of the firm are Mohan Gopalakrishnan (CEO) and Karthik Krishnamoorthy (CTO). Gopalakrishnan was associated with multiple companies including Oracle, Sybase and Symantec, as country manager running India engineering and operations. Krishnamoorthy, on the other hand, has worked as a director with Cap Gemini before becoming a part of Synup.
Synup says it bagged a few hundred paying customers in Canada and the United States, its primary market, a couple of months after the launch.
The platform claims to be monitoring over 500 different local websites and networks.
Synup targets business and marketing agencies that want to advertise locally. The direct customers of the platform are local mom and pop businesses, restaurants, spas and other brick-and-mortar firms.
In short Synup enables businesses to manage their listings on over hundreds of websites and search engines on a single dashboard. It tracks customer reviews in more than 20 websites and notifies the business immediately ensuring that the businesses can monitor their rankings on nine different search engines and local directories.
It competes with US-based Signpost and Placeable and Canada-based VendAsta among others.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
