Factual Raises $35 Million to Push Expansion

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Location data provider Factual of Century City has raised a $35 million Series B round.

The company plans to use the funding to boost hiring of sales and marketing people to make a push for rapidly acquiring new customers. Also, additional engineering staff will be hired and investments will be made to grow the company’s datasets.

Factual’s location data is used in search engines, digital maps, social networks and digital advertising. Factual’s data includes geographic, business contact, user location, behavioral and demographic information. The company collects information in a variety of ways including submissions from large corporations, automated Web crawling software and information sharing agreements with mobile apps.

“We have many of the top apps leveraging our data such as Facebook, Bing and Yelp,” said Chief Executive Gil Elbaz. “App developers want their services to be more and more contextualized and customized in order to delight their users with real world context.”

Factual also sells to mobile app developers and digital advertising firms who want to better profile users and then target them with advertisements.

“An app selling ads directly, they want to offer better targeting packages, opposed to something basic like just demographics,” said Elbaz. For example, “we can figure out people who have active lifestyles based on the time they have spent on basketball or tennis courts.”

Investors in the Series B round include Altpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, Haystack Partners, Heritage Group, Index Ventures, Miramar Ventures, Tamarisk Global, and Upfront Ventures, as well as individuals Saif Mansour, Michael Ovitz and Tom Unterman. The company has raised $62 million to date.

Technology reporter Garrett Reim can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @garrettreim for the latest in L.A. tech news.

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