OwnLocal is an

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

-based

digital advertising Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

founded in 2010.

History

Lloyd Armbrust and Jason Novek founded Seeing Interactive in 2010. Backed by

seed accelerator Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often g ...

Y-Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stri ...

, the company launched as a service for

local newspaper A newspaper is a Periodical literature, periodical publication containing written News, information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as p ...

, TV, and

Radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...

s. After its launch, the startup raised $1 million in seed funding from various investors, including Lerer Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and angel investors

Joshua Schachter Joshua Schachter (; born January 1, 1974) is an American entrepreneur and the creator of Delicious, creator of GeoURL, and co-creator of Memepool. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg ...

and

Paul Buchheit Paul T. Buchheit is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former company motto ''Don't be evil'' in a 2000 ...

. The company changed its name to OwnLocal in March 2011. In October 2011, OwnLocal received an undisclosed amount from a funding round led by

Automattic Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com (a freemium blogging service), as well as its contributions to WordPress (an open source blogging software). The co ...

, the developer of

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

. The incubator

500 Startups 500 Global (previously 500 Startups) is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California ...

also participated in the funding. The round raised the company's total funding to $2 million. OwnLocal was one of the first for-profit companies to receive funding from the Knight Enterprise Fund, a fund for media innovation. The company also received an equity investment in February 2013 from Digital First Ventures for an undisclosed amount.

Acquisitions

In May 2014, OwnLocal acquired Whoosh Traffic. Whoosh Traffic was an Austin-based company that powered SEO reporting for large

Fortune 500 companies The ''Fortune'' 500 is an annual list compiled and published by ''Fortune'' magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years. The list includes publicly held companies, along w ...

and small businesses. Whoosh was backed by Techstars, 500 Startups, and several other major technology investors. OwnLocal acquired Sidengo on March 10, 2015. Sidengo was an easy-to-use website builder for people with no design or technical skills. Sidengo was started in

Monterrey, Mexico Monterrey ( , ) is the capital and largest city of the northeastern state of Nuevo León, Mexico, and the third largest city in Mexico behind Guadalajara and Mexico City. Located at the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the city is anchor ...

by Jorge González and Gabriel Garza. As of March 2015, OwnLocal had integrated the Sidengo technology into their platform and planned to distribute the technology to their media partners. OwnLocal acquired Inbound Press in March 2016. Inbound Press was created in Orange County, California by Andrew McFadden. The company's flagship product, Smart Media Kit, is a proven process that generates new advertising leads for newspapers. OwnLocal had added Smart Media Kit to its product offerings as of June 2016. In 2017, OwnLocal acquired Wanderful Media.

References

{{reflist, 33em Marketing companies established in 2010 Companies based in Austin, Texas Advertising agencies of the United States Y Combinator companies