Announcing Yozio’s Series A Funding

July 28, 2015
Ashu Garg

In 2013, time spent consuming digital media among US adults surpassed time spent watching TV for the very first time. At the heart of this shift is mobile. Mobile comprises 50% of time spent on digital media today and will play a crucial role in the next era of marketing, as I outlined in my latest white paper—MarTech and the Decade of the CMO. Our philosophy of the importance of mobile drove Foundation Capital to invest in app marketing and analytics powerhouse Localytics last year, and now it’s brought us to Yozio and its founders Lei Sun, Dane Holewinski, and Li Hong. Today we are very happy to announce a $7 million Series A round of funding for Yozio.

When my partner Joanne Chen met with Lei at the start of this year, she was blown away: “Lei’s personal story of creating a life for himself here in America from nothing was very inspiring—and his passion and determination to make his own success made him quite special.” When Joanne met the rest of the team, she was equally impressed. “When I got to know Dane and Li, I realized this was the kind of dream team we needed to back. It was truly a case of the whole being even greater than the sum of its parts,” Joanne said.

Yozio got our attention by setting their sights on two of the greatest challenges facing our new mobile world. The first obstacle is the fragmentation of the app ecosystem and mobile platforms. Users want a uniform experience no matter which screen, device, or operating system they happen to be using—and today that is far from the case. Yozio has developed a uniform infrastructure for building and managing apps deployed through a SaaS platform, addressing one substantial facet of the challenge of fragmentation.

The second core challenge to the mobile world is measurement. Users navigate the Internet by clicking links within and between websites. Those clicks come with tracking pixels and cookies that allow marketers to better understand and reach users through SEM, SEO, and retargeting. On mobile, this measurement system is simply broken because trackable links between apps and the web largely do not exist. Yozio’s platform addresses this problem by implementing analytics that measure which marketing campaigns and channels are driving app downloads, activations, sign ups and revenue.

Yozio has helped transform companies that built huge presences on the web but had yet to crack mobile. Over the past two years, Yozio has driven successes for customers, including Etsy, Pinterest, and Airbnb, by creating the bridge between web and mobile these organizations needed to thrive in our new digital economy.

While mobile organic growth and referral marketing is still early days, we believe it will follow the same trajectory as mobile app analytics and emerge as a substantial marketing category over the coming years, with Yozio leading the charge. As the rapid shift toward mobile continues, every company with a web presence will need to win customers by driving app installs and providing a seamless experience for users no matter which screen they are on.

Congratulations on your success, Yozio. We couldn’t be happier to welcome you to the Foundation Capital family.

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And if you are an entrepreneur, founder, or marketer who wants to learn more about the mobile revolution and this new decade of the CMO, reach out and say hello to us on Twitter at @ashugargand @joannezchen.