SimilarGroup: Alexa & comScore Competitor SimilarWeb Raises Series C From Naspers, Is Now Headed To Mobile

SimilarGroup, the makers of a would-be Alexa killer called SimilarWeb which analyzes web rankings via a panel containing millions of web surfers, has raised a Series C round of funding. The new funding comes entirely from Naspers, the South African multinational media group that owns minority stakes in major internet companies worldwide, including a 30% stake in Tencent (Asian internet giant and makers of WeChat) as well as roughly the same in Russia’s Mail.ru Group. SimilarGroup’s valuation and the size of the round aren’t being officially disclosed, but TechCrunch is hearing that the Series C is “significant” – that is, in the tens of millions. To date, SimilarGroup had raised $7.1 million in seed through Series B rounds. As a part of the new funding, SimilarGroup will gain a new board member from Naspers. However, the company is not able to disclose who this is at present. “They are huge investors that build very big companies, and they’re the best investors a startup can have…Every company in their portfolio is a one billion dollar company,” touts SimilarGroup CEO Or Offer of his company’s new investor Naspers, noting that the firm has invested in major international businesses like Brazil’s e-commerce giant Buscapé, the “Amazon of India” Flipkart, and online classifieds platform OLX, to name a few. He also notes that this is Naspers’ first investment in Israel and in the analytics and data space. SimilarGroup, for those unfamiliar, was founded in 2009, but up until fairly recently, was known for its suite of branded browser plugins (e.g. SimilarWeb, SimilarSites), which offered users suggestions of other websites similar to the one they’re visiting, and other useful information like web rankings, traffic sources, or reach, for example. However, SimilarGroup’s larger goal was in developing a sizable network involving hundreds of un-branded browser plugins across a variety of verticals. This allowed it to develop a panel containing “tens of millions” of end users around the world. From these users, SimilarWeb is able to determine a website’s rankings at a scale that’s larger than competitors like Compete or comScore, which clock in at around 2 million users each. In addition, the company has focused heavily on data science, employing those with machine-learning, big data and statistics backgrounds to ensure data accuracy. Last fall, the company expanded upon its free web analytics offering with the launch of SimilarWeb Pro, a paid version of its measurement service. Today, that service has scaled to thousands of paying customers, including big names like