LA-based Sometrics has secured a Series B round of venture capital, led by Walt Disney Company-affiliated Steamboat Ventures and joined by previous investors The Mail Room Fund and Greycroft Partners. In total, $4 million was injected into the fledgling company, we’ve learned.
That brings the total invested in the startup to $5.55 million. The first round was raised back in May 2008. It was the first investment made by The Mail Room Fund, a joint venture fund established by William Morris Agency, Accel Parners and Venrock.
Sometrics is one of many companies looking to optimize the way social networks, gaming platforms and virtual worlds are being monetized. The startup markets tools that allow publishers and brands to manage ad inventory across social web platforms, optimize campaigns through audience analysis and targeting, as well as gain ’social intelligence’ about the performance of those campaigns through detailed analytics.
The latter part is what the company started out with, by giving social app developers a way get an overview of the number of page views and unique visits, installs and uninstalls, age of users, gender of users, number of friends, location of users and more for their Facebook and MySpace apps.
The company has since diversified and broadened its offering, and now does a little bit of everything that publishers and advertisers can tap into to get more ROI from advertising campaigns on social gaming sites, community sites and from sales of virtual goods across the board. Sometrics appear to be gravitating towards a focus on game developers, particularly with their Virtual Currency Manager product. The startup already boasts a number of partnerships with players in the online gaming industry, such as Playdom and Outspark.
Virtual goods and social advertising are an interesting field that’s poised for growth, but there’s a lot of competition in the space, with companies like SocialMedia.com and OfferPal Media offering services similar to what Sometrics markets. Maybe the pedigree of co-founder and CEO of Sometrics, Ian Swanson, can help the company stand out among them; Swanson used to run business development for AOL-owned Userplane and was an executive at Sprint before that.
I’ll be interested to see how that market develops in the coming years. It seems to have already exploded pretty well though.
Lookery shut down more than a month ago. Do some homework Robin!
Thanks for the post Techcrunch.
I’d like to make a few corrections…
Sometrics’ success to date is based on a great group of talented people (engineers, business development, customer service, etc.). I’m very fortunate and proud to share a fantastic team with my partners and we all take pride in the “wins” – like this founding round.
Sometrics is not a fledgling company. One year ago, we shifted our business model to focus on virtual currency and goods in social games, MMOs, and virtual worlds. This shift combined our analytics and advertising products to deliver a much needed solution for game publishers – a virtual currency monetization platform. Many startups make a shift and ours has worked for better [some others have closed shop].
Our product suite combines deep analytics and optimization techniques for virtual currency monetization. The result is a 15-20% lift in revenue – average eCPM of $725 for our publishers! We’ve partnered with many of the top gaming companies in the industry – Playdom, Outspark, K2 Networks, Ntreev, NHN, Ndoors, Atlus Online, and many more.
I’d like to thank our original investors Mail Room Fund, Greycroft Partners, Big Sky Ventures, and AT&T for their continued support. In addition, I’m excited to add a great new partner in Steamboat Ventures.
Thanks,
Ian Swanson
Co Founder and CEO
Sometrics, Inc.
[note: I did not run business development at Userplane - I was part of a great team their too.]
Love these guys!!
Sometrics ROCKS!
We’ve had good results with Sometrics on our multiplayer online games. We’ve used them as a monetization option as well as an advertising option to drive more traffic to our games.
We use all the “regulars” in terms of payment options and Sometrics is the one partner that really acts like a partner and is genuinely interested in helping us be successful.
With that said, I’m glad they got the funding to keep doing what they are doing.
congrats Ian and team!