Qriously


Qriously is a London-based ad-tech company, owned by Brandwatch. According to Bloomberg, Qriously "provides an online service for measuring location-based public sentiments in real-time". The company's business model is based around developing advertisements within mobile apps which display questions for users to answer. The responses are used to tailor other advertisements.

History

Qriously was co-founded by Austrians Christopher Kahler, Gerald Müller and Abraham Müller. The founders were working in China in 2007, where they created Urbian, a location-based mobile business that prefigured Foursquare. Two venture capital funding rounds ran out in 2010, so they focused on building Android apps that could be profitable, and this grew into asking mobile users simple targeted questions.
They returned to Austria in 2010, and raised $1.6 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, based on setting up the company up in London.
As of June 2015, Qriously had raised $5.1 million, and had 19 employees. Its Series A round was led by Spark Capital, and its previous backer Accel also participated.
Qriously are headquartered in London, with further offices in Los Angeles and Paris.
As of March 2018, the company is owned by Brandwatch.

Political polling

Qriously claimed that their polls correctly predicted the outcome of the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 Italian referendum.
On the day before the 2017 United Kingdom general election, Qriously and Wired published a poll showing voting intentions of 41% for Labour and 39% for the Conservatives. The final results were 41% and 44% respectively and so the poll did not correctly predict the outcome. However, the Qriously figure for Labour was closer than most of the mainstream polls in the run-up to the election.

Worst name in ad-tech

In 2014, Qriously won Advertising Age award for the "worst name in ad-tech", after voting in a poll, where it beat Vungle, Nanigans, AdsWizz, and Burt.