Investment Round: Niantic, Lyft, Supermetrics, Packetzoom

Investment Round is our fortnightly update on which firms have secured new funding, which areas are seeing the most financing, and who is putting up the cash that enables these companies to keep pushing the capabilities of mobile marketing further.

Niantic
Niantic Labs, the developer of smash hit game Pokémon Go, has raised $200m (£150m) in a round led by Spark Capital.
Spark, which has previously backed the likes of Twitter and Oculus, was joined by NetEase, Founders Fund, and You & Mr Jones.
The funding pushes Niantic’s valuation above the $1bn ‘unicorn’ mark.
“This round enables new strategic opportunities and enhances our ability to make long-term investments in augmented reality and the Niantic real-world platform,” said Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke.
This funding follows the announcement earlier this month that Niantic is teaming up with Warner Bros and JK Rowling for its next game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

Lyft
Taxi booking app Lyft has raised an additional $500m funding, an extension to the $1bn it announced in October.
As with the previous round, this funding is led by CapitalG, the growth investment fund operated by Google parent company Alphabet.
The deal was first reported by Axios. In a statement, a spokesperson for Lyft said: “Increasing the potential for this round will allow us to further accelerate our commitment to serving passengers and drivers.”
This funding raises Lyft’s valuation to $11.5bn.

PacketZoom
PacketZoom has raised $5m in Series A funding to scale development and adoption of its application performance management and optimisation platform.
The round was led by Baseline Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Tandem Capital and Arafura Ventures.
“Poor network quality causes mobile app publishers operational challenges and costs them millions in lost monetispation opportunities,” said Shlomi Gian, CEO of PacketZoom. “PacketZoom’s platform is the only solution that’s been designed from the ground up to address these issues. Our platform provides mobile app developers with real-time insights, control and optimisation capabilities without needing to make any code changes.”
The funding will be used to help the company expand into Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America, and enable it to fill key positions in its executive team.

Supermetrics

Marketing analytics company Supermetrics has closed a €3.5m (£3.1m) Series A funding round from OpenOcean Capital.
Supermetrics collates marketing data from across various offerings, so that users have a single view for monitoring and analysis. It says the funding will be used to ‘strategically invest in its technology’.
“I’m proud of the rapid growth our exceptional team has pulled off,” says Mikael Thuneberg, CEO of Supermetrics. “What’s more important, however, is what that growth means – the millions of hours of boring manual work we save marketers from every year. This new funding gives us additional resources to accelerate technology and product innovation, and to expand quickly and strategically into new markets.”