Ground Truth has raised $7 million in venture capital, which it will use for international expansion and product enhancements.

The funds were received from Emergence Capital Partners and OpenAir Ventures. Ground Truth hopes this funding will help fuel its momentum.

Mobile Marketer?s Giselle Tsirulnik interviewed Sterling Wilson, CEO of Ground Truth, Seattle, regarding the funding. Here is what he said:

What is the $7 million going to be used for?
The financing will be used to enhance Ground Truth's product offerings, meaning adding additional product development and sales/marketing staff, and to expand internationally.

Who are some of Ground Truth's competitors?
While no existing measurement firm uses the same census-based, patent-pending methodology that Ground Truth does. The closest competitors are Nielsen and comScore, which rely largely on surveys of thousands to collect their mobile Internet usage data, reported two-to-three months after the month the activity took place.

The reliance on surveys prevents these firms from accurately measuring mobile Web site traffic, engagement or clickstream, as survey respondents cannot reliably remember everywhere they went on the mobile Web a month ago, how much time they spent there, how they got there and where they went afterwards. 

In contrast, Ground Truth directly measures the activity of millions, reporting precisely on mobile Internet usage, on a weekly basis.

Since the data is coming from mobile network infrastructure, there is no reliance on memory of the composition of the panel of those surveyed, which produces more precise, accurate mobile metrics.

How will this $7 million position the company for growth?
The funds will allow Ground Truth to scale up its product development and sales and marketing resources and augment the number of mobile subscribers under measurement, currently at 3 million, enabling product enhancements, additional client acquisitions and increasing the number of partnerships with data providers.

The funding will also provide the resources to take the Ground Truth service international, further amplifying growth.

What challenges do you hope to address with this funding?
Our ambitions are limited only by the resources we have to bring them into fruition.

We have accomplished a lot as a small company whose product has been available for only three months, but to take the company and product to the next level, we need more Ground Truth team members, or ?Truthers? as we call ourselves.

With these funds, we can better service our clients with enhanced product functionality and reporting, more geographies and the highest level of customer service.

How will you be raising the standard in mobile measurement?
The mobile market has relied upon estimates and conjecture to measure the mobile Web. None of the existing resources can accurately count mobile Web traffic or engagement.

As advertisers, brands and other media look to invest significant resources into the mobile Web, they need significantly better data that is comparable to what they are able to get on the fixed Internet.

Estimates of traffic to the top 20 or so mobile Web sites, which vary widely between the various measurement companies using an identical methodology and the publishers themselves, no longer suffice for transacting on the mobile Internet.