SAO PAULO, BRAZIL -- Apontador, the industry leading service that helps twenty million Latin Americans each month find and review what they need from over ten million local businesses and restaurants, is receiving fifteen million dollars from Movile, Latin America’s leading mobile commerce platform. The goal of the investment is make Apontador a mobile-first platform that connects people on the go to local businesses while nurturing local commerce for small merchants. The news follows Movile’s recent $55 million dollar round of funding and adds local business search and review to its suite of mobile apps that already includes the region’s premier food delivery app, iFood.
“Movile is a fantastic partner for us moving forward because they are mobile experts and we already have a great web product.” said Moacir Kang, Apontador's CEO. “We’ve seen what they’ve done with iFood, quintupling their orders taken through mobile in under a year. Now we’re ready to grow Apontador even faster in the next year by embracing mobile at a time when the region is taking off. ”
Apontador makes finding exactly what you need--from the right restaurant, repairman or rug store--easy. The app is powered by reviews from your friends, family and a community of millions of other passionate shoppers; altogether, the app’s community of over two million creates thousands of community-generated reviews of over ten million businesses across in Brazil. Beyond making life easier by helping find what you need, Apontador is a central location for booking reservations, seeing where your friends are and receiving exclusive access to promotions and deals. The app was recently named one of Brazil’s top innovative companies by Fast Company ‘defining how Brazilians do local’. Small business owners also get powerful tools to understand how people are interacting with their company on the app, helping manage relationships with new and existing customers.
“Apontador is the city guide you need if you’re in Brazil” said Fabricio Bloisi, CEO and cofounder of Movile. “Apontador is a fantastic app that’s perfectly at home in our suite of mobile commerce apps because finding local business is an essential connector between people and the goods and services people use everyday.”
The future of local commerce is on mobile, and it’s starting to heat up right now. According to a recent study the number of Brazilians who use mobile internet increased by 106 percent in only two years, while M-commerce rose 82 percent in under a year, putting it on pace to double in 2014 alone. As Brazilians and Latin Americans increasingly adopt smartphones, there’s a big opportunity to help connect them with the purchases and businesses they need in their day to day life.
About Apontador:
Apontador is the largest maps route and local search website & app in Latin America. Founded in June 2000, today, Apontador gathers information about more than 10 million points of interest (hotels, restaurants, museums, etc), live content (movie information, gas price, shows, events, etc), ad classifieds and real-time traffic information. The Company currently powers the Local and Telematics offering of leading service providers including Vivo, Nextel, Claro, Oi, Microsoft, Yahoo, Publicar, Terra Networks, Globo.com, UOL, and Editora Abril among others and has partnerships with foremost technology providers including Webraska, Akamai, Google and Ericsson. Under its brands, Apontador operates in Brasil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay.
About Movile:
Movile is a leading mobile commerce platform in Latin America. Its product portfolio includes smartphone and tablet applications for content and commerce. With its latest funding round in 2014, Movile is expanding aggressively into the Online To Offline (O2O) space of apps and services. Movile has over 400 employees and is connected to over 40 carriers that collectively have 700 million mobile subscribers. More than 50 million people experience Movile’s products and services per month. Naspers, a leading global media & e-commerce group, has been a key strategic partner and shareholder of Movile since 2008.
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