San Francisco based digital marketing firm HYP3R raised a $17.3 million in its series A fundraising round last week. Contributors to the round were Structure Capital, Rokk3r Fuel, Thayer Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank among others. This brings the company’s total funds raised to $23 Million.
Founded in 2015 by Carlos Garcia, HYP3R uses location data to help companies track and communicate with customers. It’s software allows marketing teams to monitor public social media postings that have been geotagged, without relying on tags and hashtags, so that they can interact with customers in real time.
“Our mission is to make marketing efficient for businesses and delightful for consumers,” Garcia said. “We achieve this by helping our partners reach high-value customers — people who have been to the company’s or competitor’s locations. We then make it easy to retain customers long-term through real-time, authentic engagement.”
“For the longest time, marketing has been an interruption, and we want to make marketing welcome,” Garcia said. “If you are at a hotel and you’re celebrating a life event like an anniversary or maybe an engagement or birthday, will that brand or hotel be able to elevate that experience, add to it, and not interrupt it,” he added. Garcia believes that this is what real-time, location-based engagement will achieve.
“We coexist with all of those social media management platforms that are in the marketer’s technology stack– whether it’s Sprinklr or Spreadfast,” Garcia added. “Our goal is not to enable a workflow of listening to and publishing on social media, our goal is to acquire and engage customers on location. It’s a different mindset that has a lot more ROI for our customers.”
Thayer Ventures managing director, Chris Hemmeter, says, “We look at a lot of companies focused on travel. At HYP3R, we found a dynamic team with the energy and talent to lead innovation in travel and hospitality marketing.”
