MaxPoint Interactive’s revenue jumped 61% last year

Digital marketing company MaxPoint Interactive, which unveiled plans to go public earlier this month, has filed updated financial results that report its revenue jumped 61 percent and zoomed past the $100 million milestone in 2014.

The company also continued to expand its workforce, adding 32 employees in the fourth quarter and a total of 154 in 2014, giving it a total of 323 workers. All but five of its workers are based in the U.S.

“We intend to further expand our overall headcount and operations both domestically and internationally,” the company noted in its filing.

MaxPoint’s earlier filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in which it outlined plans to raise as much as $75 million in an initial public offering, only included financial results for the first three quarters of 2014.

In the fourth quarter MaxPoint generated $38.6 million in revenue, up 59 percent from a year earlier. The company posted a fourth-quarter loss of $1.5 million, compared to net income of $1.2 million a year earlier.

For all of 2014, Maxpoint reported revenue of $106.5 million, up from $66.1 million in 2013. It posted a $13 million loss in 2014, versus a loss of $187,000 in 2013.

MaxPoint’s software uses the power of “big data” to help companies target consumers online who live in neighborhoods with appealing demographics. MaxPoint connects billions of data points from brick-and-mortar stores and online and social media to identify neighborhoods that are fertile grounds for a particular product or services. It has created the digital equivalent of ZIP codes by dividing the nation into 44,000 neighborhoods, which it calls Digital Zips.

MaxPoint sells its software as a service either directly to customers or through advertising agencies that represent those customers. Its customers include Starbucks, appliance maker Electrolux and pasta company Barilla.

Founded in 2007, MaxPoint is led by founder and CEO Joseph Epperson, who previously was finance director at eBay’s PayPal division.

The company credited its growth in 2014 to an increase in “enterprise customers” that account for more than $10,000 in annual revenue. MaxPoint had 479 such customers at the end of the year, up 58 percent from a year earlier. In addition, revenue per enterprise customer rose 2.5 percent in 2014.

According to one of the case studies cited in its filing, when Barilla used MaxPoint software to launch a new line of gluten-free pasta its per-store sales were 20.2 percent greater than they were in the approximately 100 stores in a control group that did not participate in the online marketing campaign.

MaxPoint is the first Triangle company to file plans to go public this year.

In the past two years, an unprecedented run of Triangle companies have gone public. Last year, six Triangle companies had successful initial public offerings, and seven local companies went public in 2013.

This story was originally published February 17, 2015 at 2:23 PM with the headline "MaxPoint Interactive’s revenue jumped 61% last year."