Ground Truth and Umber Systems merge

The merged business has also raised $8m from North Bridge Venture Partners, Steamboat Ventures, Voyager Capital, Emergence Capital and Opeanair Equity Partners. Mobile Intelligence Solutions will be led by Ground Truth’s Sterling Wilson (pictured) as president and CEO. Umber’s Asa Kalavade has been named CTO and SVP of engineering.

Mobile Intelligence Solutions will house two divisions, one that offers carrier analytics under the Umber brand and a syndicated mobile market intelligence business that will operate under the Ground Truth name.

Wilson said: “Ground Truth has long admired Umber’s strengths in delivering intelligent monitoring and analytics solutions to carriers – via a massively scalable platform that works across applications, devices, networks and locations and helps carriers obtain an ongoing picture of mobile data usage.”

Umber founder Asa Kalavade added: “Combining Ground Truth’s deep expertise in mobile measurement for syndicated market research products and services with our advanced carrier analytics platform will bring to the market place the type of sophisticated analytics and measurement all participants in the mobile ecosystem – from carriers to marketers and publishers – are clamouring for.”

Ground Truth was formed in early 2010 and was soon awarded $7m in private equity funding to fuel its international expansion strategy. Earlier this year the firm partnered with Kantar-owned web audience researcher Compete to provide a combined view of consumer behaviour online and on mobile devices.