Yext Spins Off Pay-Per-Call Ad Business As Felix | TechCrunch

Yext has made the famous startup pivot, shifting focus from its pay-per-call advertising service to a new product called PowerListings. But rather than simply abandoning its old business, the company is announcing today that it?s spinning off the pay-per-call part of the company into a wholly-owned subsidiary called Felix.

Yext CEO Howard Lerman says the pay-per-call business was doing just fine (it?s supposedly profitable and on-track to bring in nearly $30 million in revenue this year), but he saw an even bigger opportunity in PowerListings, a service that helps businesses update and synchronize their listings across more than 40 local search services in real-time. Now, he says that splitting the two companies seems like the best way to ?maximize the value of both.?

The two teams were already working on separate floors, so in some ways this is just making the split official. At the same time, Lerman says the pay-per-call business has been neglected recently in favor of PowerListings, so with this news, we should see some ?new momentum? behind the older product.

Another bonus: Until now, a technical bug meant that businesses could only sign up for either PowerListings or pay-per-call advertising. Starting tomorrow, they can sign up for both.

So why ?Felix?? Yext co-founder Brent Metz, who will serve as CEO of the new company, compares the name to Siri, the mobile personal assistant technology that was acquired by Apple. Felix, Metz says, is a different kind of voice-activated intelligent agent ? instead of helping you accomplish basic tasks on your iPhone, it listens to customer phone calls and determines which ones were actually good for your business. Metz wants to build out this technology further, to help businesses understand which calls are leading to sales, which ones aren?t, and why.

Yext itself, meanwhile, will continue to focus on PowerListings, which Lerman says has grown to more than 40,000 paid subscriptions in less than a year. The company was one of the startups launching products at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009, a demo that led to a $25 million funding led by Institutional Venture Partners.

September 16, 2006

$38.8M

Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations. The company was founded in 2006 by Howard Lerman, Brian Distelburger and Brent Metz.

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Howard Lerman is co-founder and CEO of Yext. Howard Lerman is a serial entrepreneur who has helped lead three previous ventures, all of which have had successful exits. He founded Yext in 2006, with the vision of reinventing the way local businesses and consumers connect. Over the last four years, Yext has evolved to provide a range of products designed so that all local businesses can take advantage of the power of internet advertising. Yext takes a unique approach to...

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Brent Metz is responsible for the company?s Pay-Per-Action phone call product, Yext Calls???. Prior to founding Yext, Brent was a senior scientist at IBM?s Speech Recognition Labs, helping to guide the Company?s overall voice strategy and representing the company to the technical community. He is a domain expert in Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies, with over a dozen patents pending. Mr. Metz is an IBM Extreme Blue alumnus, a distinction he earned while completing his bachelor?s...

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