Yext Raises $10 Million for Power Listings, Goes Mobile

Yext announced today that it closed a $10 million D round led by Right Media founder Michael Walrath, and existing investors (SV Angel, Sutter Hill).

The funding will help Yext to continue to build out its Power Listings product. At our ILM show last year, the always-energetic Yext CEO Howard Lerman demoed how Power Listings (then called Tags) provides “one-stop” to manage listings across local search sites.

This becomes increasingly relevant as the local search space continues to fragment, and users go to myriad sources to get, and contribute, local info (the same trend has driven the emerging field of reputation management). The simplicity of Power Listings has been a core selling point.

Power Listings also represents the latest of a few pivots for Yext (I mean that in a good way), previously having a core call monetization business and … speak of the devil … reputation management (Yext Rep). The core call tracking business still provides a healthy revenue stream.

But within the last year, Power Listings have taken over as the growth opportunity and main focus. As for the funding, it will go toward integrating 100 more local search sites and apps so that its “one-stop shop” value proposition is that much more comprehensive.

“This is an important step for us as we continue on our mission to make business listings simple,” Lerman told me. “We plan to use this investment to rapidly expand our Power Listings network … it’s all about the publishers.”

Yext will also pour resources into a mobile app that lets businesses access and manage listings on the go. This will include the ability to take and upload pictures of their locations — a nice feature that will bring more simplicity to non-savvy SMBs.

Congrats to Lerman and team on the funding, vote of confidence and continued innovation/gear switching in a fast-paced market. More to on that from Lerman’s blog post.