Mobile CRM startup Linko raises $2.6 million in seed funding, acquires Berlin-based Localstream

Linko, a fledgling international company building a mobile customer relationship management solution that automates the collection of sales activity data in real time, has secured $2.6 million in seed funding.

The cash comes primarily from a group of international angel investors, including Giuseppe Donagemma (Satispay, ex-Nokia), former TeliaSonera exec Pekka Vartiainen, IBM and Nokia vet Pertti Melamies, Kairos Group co-founder Roberto Condulmari and others.

In addition, the company has acquired Localstream, a platform for adding location context to Web and mobile content. Both companies have their product development headquarters in Berlin, Germany.

The fresh capital will be used to expand Linko’s development team and "advance the product".

Said product isn't actually available yet, as it remains in private beta until further notice, but according to Linko it basically automates CRM by aggregating customer communications data from smartphone and tablet apps, and delivering reports in real time through user-managed filters.

The company says 2,000 potential clients have already signed up for the service prior to its public launch. Linko didn't say when that would be, however.

Buying Localstream, ramping up its executive team

The acquisition of location-based search and content publishing platform startup Localstream is mainly meant to boost Linko's executive team, it appears.

Localstream co-founders Mark MacMahon and Jilles van Gurp, who previously led the development of some of the core services behind Nokia's HERE technology platform, are now on board.

http://t.co/TkNzzaWCTh Localstream is now Linko. Exciting times for us.

— Jilles van Gurp (@jillesvangurp) January 14, 2014

In a statement on their website, Localstream's co-founders say:

"For the past year we have worked tirelessly to build a highly scaleable Local Search Platform that greatly simplifies the problem of automatically linking content to locations such as cities, neighbourhoods and venues. We will now start to use the Localstream technology to add location context to Linko's groundbreaking mobile CRM system."

The Localstream platform will no longer be supported, as of today. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we've learned that it only involved stock (as in, no cash changed hands).

Also worth noting: Olga Steidl, former VP of Mobile Ecosystem at Yandex, has joined Linko's executive team to lead the marketing, user acquisition and growth.

Linko was originally founded in Helsinki, Finland in December 2010 as a CRM software company dubbed Dealmachine. Its former CEO, Timo Herttua, has since moved on to go work for Angry Birds creator Rovio as the enterprise software company morphed into a U.S. corporation.

Linko now operates in San Francisco, Berlin and Helsinki and is led by its founder, serial entrepreneur Mikko Alasaarela.