Very exciting news to Israel’s SaaS SEM start up Kenshoo. The company has announced an undisclosed amount of additional funding from current investors Sequoia. The proceeds will support the launch of the new “Kenshoo Local“, a campaign management solution for organizations managing large volumes of Local or SMB/SME campaigns, such as online directories, agencies, publishers and small business service providers.
Michael Moritz is a strong evangelist of Kenshoo even though he is not the investing partner (Yuval Baharav of Sequoia Israel is on Kenshoo’s board). Moritz jokes that Kenshoo is going to succeed where other failed, because it’s a double ‘o’ company: Google, Yahoo, Facebook… and Kenshoo.
In a more serious note, Moritz, who also backed Google, gave the following endorsement following Kenshoo’s first round in 2007:
Mastery of search engine marketing is the biggest single challenge facing any marketer or advertiser. Sequoia Capital invested in Kenshoo because of its fresh approach to this task and because the company’s battle-hardened software has already paid off in thousands of different search campaigns.
Kenshoo Local launched during the Interactive Local Media conference, last week. The platform enables small business owners such as dentists to easily set up search marketing campaigns as well as monitoring of competitor campaigns. The system makes keyword recommendations and optimizes for conversion which can be defined by the user as a click or a call.
In the official announcement Sivan Metzger, the GM for Local said: “We are proud to be the first enterprise search technology company that takes on the local market by making the advantages of a robust enterprise solution available to SMB’s, via Agencies or online marketing services providers.”
Kenshoo was founded in 2006 by Yoav Izhar-Prato, Nir Cohen and Alon Sheafer. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv, where it employs approximately 50 people and has offices in NY, SF and London. Not including the current round, the company raised about $10 million from Sequoia and Arts Alliance.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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