Verve Raises $14M C Round From Qualcomm, Nokia, Blue Run Ventures

Verve Mobile, which provides a Web-based platform that enables its media customers to offer news and advertising to mobile users, says it has raised $14 million in a Series C round led by Nokia Growth Partners, a corporate venture fund of the Finnish wireless giant.

Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate investing arm of San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), and BlueRun Ventures, an existing investor, joined in the round. The investment from Nokia was a reunion of sorts for Verve co-founder and president Tom Kenney, who was overseeing mobile Internet investments for Nokia Venture Partners, a previous incarnation of Nokia’s investment fund, before he helped start BlueRun Ventures with funding from Nokia, Goldman Sachs, and others.

Kenney, who lives near San Diego, founded Verve Wireless in 2005 with Art Howe, a newspaper industry executive and former journalist in the Philadelphia area. The company is now based in Carlsbad, CA, Washington, DC, (where CEO Tom MacIsaac is based), and New York, where much of the U.S. advertising industry is based. The company rebranded itself as Verve Mobile in August.

In its statement today, Verve says it plans to use the capital to expand its mobile location-based advertising and publishing products, which use geo-sensing technologies and dynamic advertising to deliver offers to mobile users. Verve posted a report on its website earlier this month with insights from its analysis of more than 2,500 location-based advertising campaigns delivered on its mobile platform during 2012. In today’s statement, MacIssac says, “Verve’s focus is combining big data, location-based services (LBS) and ad technologies to make mobile advertising work better for advertisers and publishers.”

Kenney also tells me Verve plans to use the funding to expand its roster of national sales personnel and engineers. The company now has about 75 employees, up from about 50 employees nearly a year ago, and is expected to grow to 120 staffers by the end of this year.

The company’s focus also has expanded from regional newspapers and broadcasters to a nationwide mobile media platform. “We’re one of the top five mobile ad networks now,” Kenney says. Total use of Verve’s network of media customers has grown to about 108 unique visitors per month from about 91 million in March 2012.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.