URX (company)

URX
Industry Internet
Founded 2013
Founders John Milinovich, Andrew Look, Nathanael Smith, James Turner
Headquarters San Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
 John Milinovich (CEO, Co-Founder)
Andrew Look (CTO, Co-Founder)
Nathanael Smith (Co-Founder)
James Turner (Co-Founder)
Website urx.com

URX is San Francisco-based company that uses mobile deep linking technology to link content across devices.[1] URX works with developers and marketers to reconnect their apps to the web and intelligently route users across devices.[2]

History

URX was founded in February 2013 by four former UCLA classmates, who saw deeplinks as the key to creating a more relevant and cohesive mobile experience.[2] To first demonstrate their technology, the company used its deep linking solution to make mobile ad campaigns shoppable[3]

After graduating from Y Combinator and raising a $3.1 million seed funding round led by Google Ventures, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, First Round Capital and others in 2013, URX moved its office to South Park to open its solution to all app marketers for use across all of their marketing channels. In April 2014, a little over a year after raising its seed round, URX closed a $12 million Series A financing round led by Accel Partners with Google Ventures, SV Angel and First Round Capital participating in the financing.[1] At the time of the announcement, URX had 14 employees.

As of June 2014, URX has secured a total of $15.1 million in funding.[4]

Product

In August 2014, URX launched the world's first App Search API to enable developers to find and link users directly to relevant actions inside other apps. URX is crawling and indexing linked data about apps to build an understanding of where entities exist, how they're related to each other, and how they can be acted on. The App Search API enables developers to access this graph with specific details about the user's context (e.g. location, keywords, time, intended action) to unlock contextual relevancy between apps.[5]

In April 2014, URX announced the release of omnilinks, an intelligent link that works on all devices and can send users to a specific piece of content inside a mobile app if that user has the app installed.[1] By prepending any normal web link with urx.io/, a marketer, developer or individual can turn a link into an omnilink.[6]

Certain requirements — such as identifying a URI scheme and adding meta-data to the app’s corresponding webpage — must be met in order to enable deep linking in a mobile app.[3] In addition to current meta-tag standards by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, URX released an open sourced framework called Turnpike to help developers create URI deep links for every page in their app.[2] Omnilinks work once these requirements are in place.[6]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Winkler, Rolfe (April 28, 2014). "URX raises 12 million sets sights on links inside mobile apps". The Wall Street Journal.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Constine, Josh (October 16, 2013). "URX Is A Brilliant Mobile Ad Service That Deeplinks Customers Right To Ecommerce App Product Pages". “Tech Crunch”.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Wasserman, Todd (October 18, 2013). "How Deep Links Could Revolutionize Mobile Advertising". “Mashable”.
  4. ↑ Traeger, Jennefer (May 1, 2014). "URX Secures 12 Million in Series A Funding Led By Accel Partners". “Business Wire”.
  5. ↑ Marvin, Rob (August 27, 2014). "An App Search API for Deep Linking". “SD Times”.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Slane, Cassie (April 29, 2014). "URX Launches Universal Smart Link Tool Omnilinks, Secures $12M Funding". “BestTechie”.

External links