As we wrote yesterday a couple of months ago a company called ReachLocal raised a massive amount of money – $55 million at a pre-money valuation in the $300 million range.

ReachLocal provides online advertising services for small businesses. The company’s investors include Rho Ventures, with Galleon Crossover Fund also participating, and VantagePoint Venture Partners as return investors. This recent round of funding comes after the $12.7 million the local ad company has raised since its inception in 2004. This gives ReachLocal an estimated valuation at $305 million, which is $55 million more than its previous valuation.

With that amount in its pockets ReachLocal stands at very good chances to reach a good market share in the location based online advertising market where mature companies like Yellowpages and SuperPages dominate the sector. Nokia has recently been seen to deploy location based mobile services and ads.  Google and Yahoo are also serious about serving ads on the local markets too.

On the ReachLocal’s video, it seems that their real value proposition is that they’ve integrated online and offline touch points (points of contact), and can track and report on this for small & medium businesses, which in most cases do not have high hurdles of integration.

ReachLocal has only one purpose as they claim: getting businesses in front of local buyers and converting “searchers” into customers.

The company is said to have patent-pending campaign optimization, management and tracking technologies, which offer unique benefits for advertisers and make it possible to follow a prospect’s progress from searcher to customer in unprecedented detail.

ReachLocal is a privately held, venture capital-backed company headquartered in Woodland Hills, CA.

Competition include Yodle, SquidBids and upspring.

[ via Mashable ]

[ via MarketingPiligrim ]