Yext Raises $27M More At A $270M Valuation

Yext, a company that helps local businesses synchronize their listings across 50 different sites, just announced that it has raised $27 million in Series E funding.

Yext did not provide a valuation, but a source close to the company tells me that it was $270 million. The round was led Marker, a new fund launched by Rick Scanlon, founder of Crescent Point Capital Group. CrunchFund (whose investor AOL owns TechCrunch) also participated, as did past investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, and WGI Group.

The company demonstrated at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009, an appearance that CEO Howard Lerman credits with landing Yext a $25 million round shortly after. At the time, Yext was in a different business — a pay-per-call advertising service which it spun off earlier this year into a wholly-owned subsidiary called Felix.

Now Yext is focused on its PowerListings service, which businesses use to make sure their information is up-to-date on all the different local search and listings sites across the Web. Yext says that it has powered 950,000 different location updates for 50,000 businesses. The updates include:

68,000 changes of address
109,000 phone number changes
150,000 hours of operation updates
160,000 photo updates
Over 250,000 featured product updates

There’s a new version coming next week, Lerman says, and the funding will be used to further develop the product. Yext, which is based in New York, may also be opening an office in Silicon Valley.

The company has now raised a total of more than $65 million. As for possible exits, Lerman claims, “Our exit strategy is to build a great company.” He admits that may sound a little generic, but he emphasizes that it’s particularly important for Yext to stay independent, because that allows it to work with many different publishers in a “neutral” fashion.