Local Matters Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Tech Startup of the Month - Company Profile

INITIAL LIGHTBULB

Perry Evans has a solid record of bringing utilitarian Web-based technology to the masses. He founded MapQuest in 1995, Jabber in 2000 (ColoradoBiz's Tech Startup of the Month in May 2003), and Aptas the next year. He left Jabber in 2003 to focus on Aptas, which has been renamed Local Matters

Evans' vision: filling what he sees as a serious gap in the Web search market--the search for local businesses and services, or "local search."

"The company was really built around what we perceived to be a problem and an opportunity," said Evans. "While Google has become a huge part of daily life of many consumers ... in a global sense, it didn't work for true local information"--thanks to the lack of structured local content and the fact that Google's rankings don't localize results. Because of this, said Evans, "the yellow pages are by far the most pervasive media for describing and presenting about small businesses all over the world, yet that content was stuck in graphical files and put out to print publications."

It follows that, rather than go head-to-head against Google and other brand-name search portals, the Aptas business plan called for the development of applications to sell to the tried-and-true kingpins of local search: phone-book publishers. "We are a technology company that empowers the traditional media publisher," Evans explained. "Dex Media, R.H. Donnelley, British Telecom, etc., use our technology to improve their online product strategy."

The newly minted Local Matters has 150 employees, with 55 in Denver and the rest split between Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and a recently re-opened office in New Orleans.

FINANCING

Aptas received $8 million in seed and first rounds of financing in 2001. With the 2005 merger and new name, the company landed a new round of $15 million from Spencer Trask, a New York-based investment firm.

"Local search is increasingly being perceived as a battleground between the search engines and the traditional yellow-page publishing business.

All of the major search engines are now targeting local search."

LOCAL MATTERS CEO PERRY EVANS

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IN A NUTSHELL

"What we do is essentially work with the big directory publishers, and take their content from the print systems and deliver it in a...