2 Million Reasons for Small Businesses to Celebrate: Heyo Raises $2 Million Series A
March 18, 2014 | By Nathan | 5 Comments">5 Comments
Today we’re excited to give small business owners 2 million more reasons to celebrate.
We’ve raised $2 million dollars from Valleys’ Ventures LP to aggressively focus on helping business owners drive engagement, email leads, and sales through social marketing. Click to see why…
I’m thankful for the incredibly sharp thinkers we have on the Heyo team who are all championing the growth and support of small businesses around the world. I’m also thankful to the many mentors, advisors, and friends who have helped to support Heyo.
Most importantly, I’m thankful to our customers – especially the ones that joined Heyo not knowing that the guy on the other side of the phone was wearing christmas boxers, hustling from his Virginia Tech dorm room some 3 years ago. Thank you.
We’re looking for engineers, designers and marketers to help us release a product later this year that will redefine social marketing for small businesses. It will excite a lot of people.
If you’re interested in joining the team to work on this project with us, email me and tell me why: nathan@heyo.com
Additional Coverage:
Yahoo Finance
Roanoke Times: The $2m “Secret” Idea
Read the full press release below to hear more about this future product.
Heyo Closes $2M Series A Round with Valleys’ Ventures, LP
Blacksburg, Va., March 17, 2014. Heyo, a software as a service (SaaS) company providing a social marketing platform for small businesses looking to capture likes, emails, and sales, today announced the closing of its Series A financing, a $2 million round from Valleys’ Ventures, LP of Radford, VA. Heyo intends to use the investment proceeds to accelerate its product development initiatives and user growth, by allowing the company to increase its hiring of developers.
Heyo is unique in providing a simple interface for users to plan social media campaigns that are pre-tested and result in high conversion rates. Heyo’s mission is to better connect users to existing and potential customers and therefore sell more products and services through social networks.
“We are extremely pleased with the results and look forward to selling more bags and engaging with even more customers using Heyo,” said Amy Lombard, marketing manager at Mixed Bag Designs.
The more users adopt the Heyo platform, the better Heyo serves each user. Heyo monitors campaign success and then recommends the highest converting campaign strategies to other customers. The Heyo platform has the potential to drive success to businesses that previously struggled to get results from social marketing.
“Using Heyo, we added over 1,750 likes to our company’s Facebook page and we’ve added over 900 emails to our database in under a week with no paid advertising,” said Maggie Henris, the Social Media Manager for Joe’s Entertainment.
Heyo’s growth is directly correlating to the success it’s helping businesses achieve. The company added 118 trials in July of 2013. This number has grown 2,585%, to trial additions of 3,047 in January alone. Additionally, customer growth continues to accelerate. Heyo added more customers in February of this year than it added in the entire fourth quarter of last year.
In addition to small businesses, agencies are transitioning from higher priced social marketing solutions and instead using Heyo to manage and launch social campaigns for their clients. “Our clients are valuing our services and wanting to pay us more each month due to the success Heyo is helping us create,” said Patrick Eckstrom, CEO of MySMN Agency, which serves clients ranging from restaurants to lawyers.
Speaking for Valleys’ Ventures, Rob Patzig, Chief Investment Officer of Third Security, LLC, said “Nathan Latka has a clear vision for Heyo and a deep understanding of what small and medium sized businesses need to take advantage of social media. We are excited to be a part of this opportunity and are particularly excited about a product release coming later this year.” Valleys’ Ventures, the sole investor in this round, joins existing investors in Heyo, including David Cohen of Techstars and Paul Singh of 500 startups.
Founder and CEO Nathan Latka says, “We will continue to obsess over building the most valuable social media marketing tool for small businesses and are focused on achieving this goal. We’re excited to grow our team and will be aggressively hiring the sharpest engineering and marketing minds we can find to prepare for a new product release later this year – one that we think will really excite people.”
If you’re curious what that product release might be, Latka says you should go to Heyo.com and sign up for a trial on the home page.
ABOUT HEYO
Founded in 2012, Heyo is a Blacksburg, VA based company that provides a social marketing platform for small businesses looking to capture likes, emails, and sales. Heyo is a SaaS company operating under Lujure Media Inc.
For more information, visit www.heyo.com
ABOUT VALLEYS’ VENTURES
Valleys’ Ventures, LP is a regional venture capital fund. The fund’s general partner is managed and operated by Third Security, LLC. Third Security is a venture capital firm formed in 1999 to manage investments in public and private companies. The Third Security team leverages its experience and expertise to guide companies toward category dominance. More information is available at the firm’s website, www.thirdsecurity.com.
Meet Nathan
Nathan Latka has supported the growth of over 100,000 small businesses using social media and data driven campaigns — all without a college degree.
