Reply, a marketplace that offers local advertisers cost-per-lead transactions, on Monday filed to go public in a bid to raise as much as $60 million.
San Ramon, California, Reply allows advertisers seeking local customers to buy and sell online clicks and leads. For the quarter ended December 31, 2009, the company said it delivered more than 4.9 million such leads serving better than 5,000 advertisers, according to its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
That strategy has proven profitable. Reply reported net income of $2.5 million on revenue of $34.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2009.
“We believe that our principal competitive advantage is that we have designed our technology platform and business model to address the needs of locally-targeted advertisers,” Reply said in the filing. “Our marketplace is easy to use and allows advertisers to design scalable marketing programs without the need to hire experts or build expensive infrastructure.”
The market for local-targeted advertising is highly competitive. Reply competes against online giants such as Google, Craigslist, Yelp, and Facebook, as well as startups and offline advertising agencies, among others
The startup has raised almost $23 million from the likes of Scale Venture Partners, Outlook Ventures, and Atel Ventures.
Jefferies & Company and Piper Jaffray are serving as co-underwriters in the offering while Needham & Company and ThinkEquity are listed as co-managers for the deal.
Reply plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol RPLY.