Yext, the company that helps businesses make sure that their location data appears correctly in search results, is announcing that Jim Steele will be joining the company full-time as president and chief revenue officer. Steele was previously on the board at Yext and was most recently at InsideSales.
“I found a new younger Marc Benioff and I’m really excited,” Steele says about Yext CEO Howard Lerman. Steele, who previously was Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce, said he was also enthusiastic to reunite with the many former Salesforce coworkers who are now at Yext. He will be relocating to Yext’s headquarters in New York.
Yext has made a business out of local searches, where it helps companies like T-Mobile and Denny’s have all their locations appear correctly when users search for them on Google, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo or Yelp. Instead of looking at the location list on websites, they found that customers were increasingly searching for the information directly.
“We are focused on making search intelligent,” said Lerman. It’s an “absolutely mission critical for a business to be on the map.”
Yext could not comment on IPO plans, but TechCrunch bas been hearing from sources that the company has been preparing for its long-awaited offering, which is expected to happen this year. It is not clear yet how the market will value Yext, but they last raised money at a reported $525 million valuation and we were told that they were expecting $89 million in revenue last year.
Yext is additionally hiring David Rudnitsky, EVP of North American Enterprise Sales. Rudnitsky also spent time at both InsideSales and Salesforce.
The company has raised over $100 million from Insight Venture Partners, IVP, SV Angel and more.