Zokem Receives A Whopping 2 Million Euros In Financing, Changes Direction
Zokem, a Finnish startup previously known to work with mobile location based mobile services (see our review here), has changed direction somewhat and closed a massive 2 million euro investment round from European venture capital investors, private investors as well as public funding. The new area Zokem will try to tackle is mobile analytics.
“We are looking to gain customer base aggressively within the market research and media measurement industry over the next 12 months” states Ludovic Gaudé, CEO. Zokem will try to harness the partnerships with media measurement companies as well as research agencies including carriers and device manufacturers. Zokem's technology will allow clients to draw a full 360° picture of mobile usage and consumer behavior
Zokem is looking for a totally new way to understand consumer behaviour. Instead of measuring the more traditional in-app, network or gateway based metrics Zokem is looking to understand the complete consumer behaviour of a certain group. They are able to capture people's behaviour with different activities in the smartphone and turn those into actionable insights. Remember how we told in our previous article that they maybe know (and share) a bit too much data? Well it seems there's a lot of value in knowing what they know, but it might not make sense to show it to everyone.
The fascinating issue is that Zokem provides analytics over a wide range of areas – from people’s social behavior to music consumption and from internet browsing to adoption of services with 51 different meters that track device usage. Zokem works on all major smartphone platforms, including Android OS, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Now this might seem scary to privacy advocates out there. However, Hannu Jungman from VeraVenture puts it best in why they invested into Zokem.
“With the detailed user level mobile analytics Zokem is taking consumer research into a totally new level” comments Hannu Jungman from Veraventure, a Finnish venture capital investment company that invested in the round. He adds “What we also find important is the fact that Zokem puts consumers back in control of their own data in this sensitive offering”.
Along with the investment, Harry Santamäki, founding partner of KoppiCatch has joined Zokem. “Whether you want to see the top performing Android games in New York, access a benchmarking analysis of mobile search engines in Europe or deploy a real-time mobile poll or a marketing campaign, and measure the results — Zokem does it all” says Mr. Santamäki.
“Zokem’s vision is to use smartphones as always-on sensors-of-life”, concludes the company’s Chairman, Hannu Verkasalo. “At the moment, we are one of the first players in the market that successfully facilitates real-time mobile polls. We enable our customers and partners to answer any question concerning mobile usage and consumer behavior by opening a 360° window into people's lives”.
Zokem's story is looking good. They've been able to pivot with the knowledge they built from the consumer business to take it and move into the business to business sector where the money is for such data. The big questions in our opinion are the ones that how well is Zokem able to penetrate the market with new apps that include their metrics mechanisms. Then again, if they're really able to do what they promise - many carriers would do a lot to push those apps to the market place, one way or another.
Disclaimer: We have worked with Zokem in consultancy during the last 6 months. However, we currently do not have any on going projects.
--
Shout out to people who use RSS-readers: Have you noticed we have redesigned our site and there is a ton of stuff to read in our discussions area? Feel free to share links, news items as well as comments regarding the startup ecosystem.
Congrats! New direction makes more sense.
Thanks for a good article!
Analytics have always been our backbone - it is an essential part of our first consumer application Assistant Zoki (formerly Zokem) and continues to be our core business. Now we are ready to move forward with our B2B products, that we believe are something never seen before in the market place. The response in the market so far has been promising, so we are looking forward to launching our full catalogue of products in the near future!
It's a good time to be a start-up in Finland, with a vibrant start-up scene (AaltoES, Arctic Startup, Finnmob, etc.) Keep it up guys!
Great new for Zokem. Consumer behaviour data presented in an easy and useable fashion for the B2B-segment can be an asset yielding competitive advantage.
What I personally have found is that data in itself is merely data, and what is really lacking is how to present and exploit that data in a way which would enable business decision-makers to easily make business decisions based on consumer data which they have gathered.
Hopefully Zokem will be able to provide business executives with not only data on consumer behaviour, but a powerful overall tool, the use of which can be transformed into increased sales and better customer understanding. And I have no doubts that they can.
"What I personally have found is that data in itself is merely data, and what is really lacking is how to present and exploit that data in a way which would enable business decision-makers to easily make business decisions based on consumer data which they have gathered."
That's a very good point!
Great news guys...well done on the investment!