It’s no accident that Signal is headquartered in Chicago. Chicago is Signal’s kind of town. Vibrant, diverse, livable, and accessible, the Second City has a great talent base and a thriving technology community. It’s a fantastic place to start a business and take it global.
At Signal, “global” has been in our DNA since the company was founded in 2009. So we were thrilled to learn that Signal has been chosen as the first recipient of the annual Global Innovator Award presented by World Business Chicago and Sister Cities International. We’re deeply honored to receive such recognition from two organizations that have done so much to spread the word that our favorite city in the world is one of the globe’s great business destinations.
Signal enables the world’s leading companies to provide great experiences to their customers as they interact with them across paid, earned, and owned channels. Our technology solves a critical, worldwide challenge for marketers who need better tools for keeping up with their always-on, multi-channel, multi-device customers. Many of the most digitally-connected consumers are found outside the U.S. in markets like Japan, where Signal has achieved remarkable success.
Early on in our company’s development, in mid-2012, we began rapid international expansion to address the global demand for new cross-channel marketing technologies. By Signal’s fourth anniversary, we had entered Europe, Asia, and Latin America through various partnerships, acquisitions, and direct sales.
Our most important international move was to form a long-term partnership in 2013 with Yahoo! JAPAN, the country’s largest search, publishing, and auction platform, with tens of thousands of clients. Yahoo! JAPAN is the exclusive distributor of our platform in the Japanese market and, just a year ago, led a $27 million investment round in Signal.
Signal now has offices throughout the U.S., London, Tokyo, Singapore, Sao Paulo, and Sydney. We’ve grown from a 5-person start-up in 2010 to 125 full-time employees in 2014. Our technology supports more than 40,000 websites in 158 countries.
We’re extremely proud of our track record of success, talented employees, incredible clients, and the strong global demand for Signal’s patented Open Data Platform.
We hope you’ll join World Business Chicago, Sister Cities, and Signal at the Chicago Consular Corps Gala on Dec. 1 for the global event of the year. Read more about it here.
Photo by David Michaels.
Originally published October 15, 2014