Yelp has acquired Toronto-based Turnstyle Analytics for $20 million USD.
Founded in 2012, Turnstyle’s location-based marketing and analytics platform allows businesses to obtain insights about on-premise customer behaviour, and send real-time messages, coupons, and rewards directly to customers’ phones through guest Wi-Fi logins. In the past, the company has received funding from 500 Startups through the Distro Dojo program.
“Since our founding, Turnstyle has focused on building the best Wi-Fi marketing service to help businesses,” said Devon Wright, Turnstyle’s co-founder and CEO. “This is an exciting opportunity to expand and leverage Yelp’s resources and capabilities; together we’ll be able to help even more local businesses improve their customer retention, driving more repeat business.”
All 30 of Turnstyle’s Toronto-based employees will join the Yelp team. The service currently supports nearly 3,500 business locations worldwide, but Yelp told TechCrunch that its focus with the product will be on the North American market.
Turnstyle said that, in the short term, customers and partners will receive the same service and support. In a statement, it added that “the acquisition is going to allow Turnstyle to continue innovating our product and bring on the best talent to keep helping our customers and partners succeed.”
Yelp, which has a consumer base of 24 million monthly app users and 65 million mobile web users, expects to leverage the offline data gleaned from Turnstyle with its own online and mobile search data, delivering a more comprehensive intent-based marketing resource to local businesses.
“We’re excited to expand our product offering for local businesses through this acquisition. Turnstyle helps connect businesses to consumers through free public Wi-Fi, and is an effective retention and loyalty program that helps businesses be more successful,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp co-founder and chief executive officer.