URX (company)
| Industry | Internet |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2013 |
| Founders | John Milinovich, Andrew Look, Nathanael Smith, James Turner |
| Defunct | May 3, 2016 |
| 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) |
Number of employees | 30 (2016) |
| Parent | |
| Website | urx.com (unmaintained) |
URX was San Francisco-based company that used mobile deep linking technology to link content across devices.[1] URX worked 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.
On May 3, 2016, Pinterest, Inc. announced that it would acqui-hire 15 of its existing staff members, including three of the four co-founders.[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.[7] 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 2 3 Winkler, Rolfe (April 28, 2014). "URX raises 12 million sets sights on links inside mobile apps". The Wall Street Journal.
- 1 2 3 Constine, Josh (October 16, 2013). "URX Is A Brilliant Mobile Ad Service That Deeplinks Customers Right To Ecommerce App Product Pages". “Tech Crunch”.
- ↑ Wasserman, Todd (October 18, 2013). "How Deep Links Could Revolutionize Mobile Advertising". “Mashable”.
- ↑ Koh, Yoree (2016-05-03). "Pinterest Acquires Mobile Ad Firm URX". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2016-10-27.
- ↑ Marvin, Rob (August 27, 2014). "An App Search API for Deep Linking". “SD Times”.
- 1 2 Slane, Cassie (April 29, 2014). "URX Launches Universal Smart Link Tool Omnilinks, Secures $12M Funding". “BestTechie”.
- ↑ Aquino, Judith (May 2, 2014). "As Deep Linking Proliferates, Standards Begin to Emerge". “AdExchanger”.
