RingRevenue announces $4M capital raise
Santa Barbara-based RingRevenue has raised $4 million in a second round of venture capital financing, bringing its funding to $7.5 million since its launch in 2009.
Founded by former executives from CallWave, RingRevenue lets online advertisers and publishers track phone calls they way they have tracked online clicks for several years. Its platform lets publishers earn a commission when a reader closes a deal over the phone, and lets advertisers measure how effective their call-driven campaigns are.
Since its launch in 2009, RingRevenue has signed up some major networks of advertisers and publishers. The company said call volume over its platform has risen more than 500 percent since the start of the year.
The new funding came from Los Angeles-based GRP Partners and Santa Barbara-based Rincon Venture Partners, both investors in RingRevenue’s $3.5 million round in 2009.
CEO Jason Spievak said the new funding will be used to help RingRevenue’s customers bring more advertisers and publishers on board with call tracking, and to expand outside the United States, with the United Kingdom as the first target.
“We still had a good chunk of our Series A [venture financing] in the bank, but we’ve figured out how to step on the gas with the business in the past few months,” Spievak told the Business Times.
Digital advertising is a prominent industry in the region, with publicly traded ValueClick in Westlake Village and its Santa Barbara operation, Commission Junction, employing some of the top players in the industry.
The space is also seeing something of a renaissance in the Tri-Counties. In addition to the launch of RingRevenue, early members of Commission Junction started Impact Radius, a startup that will bring commission-based advertising to print and broadcast. A co-founder of AdECN, a Carpinteria-based digital ad network sold to Microsoft, has started The Trade Desk, a Ventura-based media trading platform.
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