Company co-founded by Romanian raises USD 15 mln for deep linking technology

Branch Metrics, a company founded in 2012 by Romanian software engineer Madalina Seghete together with Alex Austin, Dmitri Gaskin and Mike Molinet, recently attracted USD 15 million in funding to develop Branch Metrics, their deep linking technology. The group which provided the funding was led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Ben Narasin, with participation from Pejman Mar Ventures, Zach Coelius, Cowboy Ventures and TriplePoint Capital. Branch Metrics also raised USD 2.75 million in September 2014, through series seed financing. Branch Metrics is a platform that provides development tools for large companies, independent of mobile apps. Among other things, the technology allows access to documents posted via other apps, even if they are not installed on end-user terminals. Apps users that also use the Branch Metrics product can send links from those apps to friends who can access them directly. "Four years ago, just 3% of Internet use was through a mobile device – today the total is nearly 40%. As native application use is the preferred mobile experience, Branch links make the native app transitions much smoother for the end user and more like the familiar experience of web page transitions," said Alex Austin, CEO and co-founder of Branch. "At the rate developers are adopting Branch links, it's very likely that by the end of 2015, every person with a smartphone will have benefited from our technology." Branch Metrics might also open an office is Romania, as its next step would be to expand to Europe, reports local Economica.net. A Nielsen study estimates that the time consumers spend in mobile apps amounts to 89% of total time spent on mobile devices. So pundits say there is no surprise that Branch Metric’s deep links product produced exclamations of wonder at the presentation made by private placement brokers. “You just don’t get this kind of thing out of the gate very often,” New Enterprise Aassociates (NEA) General Partner Scott Sandell said, cited by Wall Street Journal. Madalina Seghete, 33, holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and an MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford, as well as a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University. She has worked as a software engineer with Borg Warner Automotive and Siemens Medical Solutions in the US, and as business analyst with Deloitte. She also worked at Yola.com, as Senior Business Product Manager and Director of Business Development and Product in San Francisco. She is currently based in Palo Alto.