Upwave, formerly Survata, is a marketing analytics company based in
San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
. It is the leading Analytics Platform that provides software and data to plan, measure and optimize brand marketing. Upwave rebranded from Survata in September 2020. Upwave’s data has been featured in outlets such as: Forbes, CBS News, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times an
USA Today The company rebranded from Survata to Upwave in September 2020.
History
Upwave was founded by Chris Kelly, former
McKinsey
McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm founded in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey, that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. McKinsey is the oldest and ...
consultant and
Matrix Partners
Matrix Partners is a US-based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early-stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconduct ...
analyst, who started the company in response to the difficulty he had as a buyer of marketing analytics.
Upwave was a member of the Summer 2012
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, St ...
class.
In June 2013, they raised a $1.5 million
seed round
Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' su ...
from PivotNorth Capital and
Uncork Capital
Uncork Capital (formerly known as SoftTech VC) is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California, founded by Jeff Clavier. Considered one of the most active established seed funds in Silicon Valley, it has invested in companies such as ...
,
[Yuliya Chernova]
"Y Combinator Grad Survata Looks to Take a Bite Out of Online Research Market".
Dow Jones VentureWire, 6/4/2013. and in June 2015 Upwave raised an additional $6 million in a
Series A round
A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exch ...
led by
Ridge Ventures, with participation from
Bloomberg Beta
Bloomberg Beta is an early stage venture capital firm with $375M under management, capitalized solely by Bloomberg. The fund exists to expand Bloomberg’s horizons by investing in companies built by extraordinary founders that are creating prof ...
, and
Initialized Capital
Initialized Capital is a venture capital fund founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian, Harjeet Taggar, and Garry Tan.
As of 2021, it has raised more than $3.2 billion in assets. Initialized Capital ha ...
led by
Alexis Ohanian
Alexis Kerry Ohanian ( hy, Ալեքսիս Քերի Օհանյան; born April 24, 1983) is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the co-founder and executive chairman of the social media site Reddit along with Ste ...
and
Garry Tan
Garry Tan (; born 1981) is the founder of Initialized Capital. He previously co-founded Posterous and Posthaven. He was also an early employee at Palantir Technologies, and a partner at Y Combinator.
Early life and education
Tan was born in 1 ...
.
In July 2018, Upwave announced a 14 million Series B led by Conductive Ventures, a venture firm funded by
Panasonic
formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Kadoma, Osaka P ...
.
Acquisitions
In April of 2021 Upwave spun out its legacy Instant Insights business.
Pro Bono
Upwave provided pro bono campaign measurement to gauge the overall performance and gather real insights for two
Ad Council
The Advertising Council, commonly known as the Ad Council, is an American nonprofit organization that produces, distributes, and promotes public service announcements on behalf of various sponsors, including nonprofit organizations, non-governme ...
Campaigns. From August - October 2020 Upwave measured the effectiveness of th
Emmy Award winningLove Has No Labels campaign. In early 2021 Upwave partnered with Ad Council again, to measure their covid-1
vaccine awareness campaign
References
Further reading
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External links
*
{{Survey data collection
Market research companies of the United States
Polling companies
American companies established in 2012
Companies based in San Francisco
Y Combinator companies
2012 establishments in California