Freespee secures 2nd round financing and wins major new business

LONDON, 8 February 2011 – Freespee AB, the cloud communications company providing lead generation management tools, is pleased to announce the successful closing of a second round of venture capital financing to further fund its growth across Europe.

At the same time, Freespee has signed European Directories (EDSA), a local search and lead generation company, as a major new client across a number of European territories.

Inventure, the venture capital fund, is investing 1.1 million euros in Freespee.

Sami Lampinen, Managing Partner at Inventure, comments: “We are seeing a very positive development for Freespee, and at the same time a European-wide increase in the amount of marketing spend going to performance-based advertising channels. Large media companies are using Freespee to track, prove and monetise their advertising properties with fully scalable technology that hasn’t been available before.”

Freespee is focused on creating an ecosystem for measuring and analysing inbound phone call traffic to advertisers from various sources. With the information, advertisers can make informed decisions as to how to optimise their advertising spend across both online and offline channels, and buy advertising according to Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) and Cost-Per-Action (CPA) bases.

The Freespee offering is attractive to both media companies and advertisers. During 2010, Freespee increased the coverage of its cloud communication platform from Scandinavia to a total of 13 European countries.

Tim Gordon, Group Strategy and Development Director for European Directories, says:  “The Freespee API is powering EDSA Call Tracking across multiple products, including our new SME website offering. The cooperation with Freespee is helping EDSA salespeople prove the strong ROI that our products deliver to advertisers.”

In addition to European Directories, Freespee’s major partners include Nordic media companies Sanoma, Schibsted (Blocket.se) and Eniro, as well as German’s markt.gruppe, and UK’s 5PM.co.uk and customer acquisition platform dianomi.

Freespee’s CEO Carl Holmquist says companies are noticing that very often online advertising converts offline. “Even digitally-minded people are starting to value the power of instant voice connection between the end customers and advertisers – and online advertising has become the biggest driver for customer leads through phone calls,” he explains. “Inbound phone calls are great compared to online leads with higher deal values and conversion rates of up to 30-50%.”

Holmquist adds, “In 2011, we are expecting affiliate and direct marketing to get onboard and measure telephone leads, in addition to classifieds and local search. Some of our partners are already experimenting with Pay-Per-Call models.  At the same time we work with our partners to develop new types of call management tools in an innovation unit called Freespee Labs. We have very exciting new solutions in the pipeline.”

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European Directories (EDSA) is a Local Search and Lead Generation company, serving 700 000 business advertisers in print, online, mobile and voice. The group has market-leading positions in Netherlands (De Telefoongids), Finland (Fonecta), Denmark (De Gule Sider), Austria (HEROLD), Sweden (Lokaldelen), Czech Republic and Slovakia (Mediatel) and Poland (pkt.pl).

http://www.europeandirectories.com/

Inventure Oy is a Helsinki, Finland, based venture capital partnership fully focusing on Nordic early stage technology companies. Its media technology portfolio companies include Freespee, Whitevector, Conmio, Rightware and Thinglink.

http://www.inventure.fi