Neustar beefs up its location data by acquiring Quova

November 5, 2010 4:53 PM
Anthony Ha
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Quova, a company that claims to power 95 percent of location searches on the Web, has been acquired by Neustar.

We heard about the news from a tipster, and a Quova spokesperson confirmed the deal. The financial details were not disclosed, but Quova will continue to operate from its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters as a subsidiary of Neustar.

Founded in 1999, Quova helps online retailers, government agencies, and other organizations determine where their website visitors are located. That allows them to improve search results, fight online fraud, regulate digital content, and deliver geographically targeted advertising. Originally distributed as traditional software, Quova launched a Web-based version of its service in 2008.

The company has raised about $38 million in funding from Sequel Venture Partners, IDG Ventures, Mobius Venture Capital, and others.

Neustar, meanwhile, is a publicly traded business. The official description on the website is a bit hard to parse, but basically the company has amassed large databases that include telephone numbers, area codes, and website addresses — it’s the authoritative directory for the .us and .biz domains.

  • samiam22

    “The official description on the website is a bit hard to parse…”So, how about trying to dig in and see who/what they really are? They are like this silent Gorilla…quite mysterious.There's got to be a good story there. . .are they some mega-stealth infrastructure beast who we all rely on, but no on knows who they are and what they control? Kind of like what Sysco is to our public food consumption? What? Do tell?

  • PeterA650

    We worked with Quova briefly in '99 (we were in the personalization space, they were in the geolocation space). They actually shipped us a server if I remember correctly.I believe they mapped the internet by pinging/tracerouting every IP, or something to that effect. Back in '99 the Internet wasn't THAT big and google was a toy at Stanford … wow. I'm getting old.

  • http://www.venturebeat.com Anthony Ha

    I think it's more a case that, like many public tech companies, they do a lot of tenuously-related stuff that's not consumer-facing. I may be missing a big story here, but I doubt it.

  • http://www.venturebeat.com Anthony Ha

    Cool!

  • samiam22

    An acquisition of this scale, in this climate, sort of reeks of some larger story at-play? By a company no one is quite sure about (THRUSH, SMERSH?) wind up with an infrastructure control level of Location Data during the height of Location Data? IDK, what IF they were making a consumer-level move? Just because it's not in the Valley, doesn't mean they aren't capable of being a giant?I'm simply curious.

  • http://www.sanjayparekh.com Sanjay Parekh

    Actually the Internet was pretty big back in 1999. I was a co-founder of Digital Enovy – a geotargeting startup that launched before Quova (and was acquired about 3 years ago).

  • http://david.ulevitch.com/ davidu

    Neustar is big. They run DNS and naming services for a large part of the Internet, not to mention all the cellphone number portability services for the United States.

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