Quova, Inc.

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Quova, Inc. — company profile

Overview. Quova, Inc. was a privately held U.S. company headquartered at 401 Castro Street, Mountain View, California, founded in 1999. It raised roughly $38 million in venture funding from investors including Sequel Venture Partners, IDG Ventures and Mobius Venture Capital. Neustar, Inc. (then NYSE: NSR) acquired Quova in October/November 2010; financial terms were not officially disclosed, though PitchBook lists a $21.7 million deal value. Quova operated as a Neustar subsidiary from Mountain View, was rebranded "Neustar IP Intelligence" in early 2012, and the business passed to TransUnion (NYSE: TRU) when it acquired Neustar for $3.1 billion in 2021. Standalone employee count and revenue for Quova could not be verified from public sources.

Products / operations. Quova was an operating company selling IP-geolocation data and services — identifying a website visitor's likely country, state or city from their IP address. Product lines included the GeoPoint IP location database, GeoDirectory Server, an internet location intelligence platform, and an on-demand web service for embedding geolocation into web applications; later offerings included IP-based audience targeting for display advertising. Documented use cases were fraud screening of online orders, geo-fencing/regulating digital content (Major League Baseball's MLB.tv blackouts), localized search results and geographically targeted advertising. It was not a patent-holding shell.

Litigation posture. The tracked data show Quova as plaintiff in one case and defendant in none — the profile of an operating company, not an NPE or mass-filing litigant. There is no evidence of a patent-assertion campaign; the single matter reads as a competitor/business dispute rather than a portfolio-licensing suit. The case is venued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Oakland Division, per docket metadata; the Unified Patents portal lists "California Eastern District Court," which appears to be a mislabel of case 4:04-cv-02674 (N.D. Cal., Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong).

Notable case. Quova, Inc. v. Digital Envoy, Inc. (filed 2004) pitted two IP-geolocation rivals against each other. The court granted in part and denied in part a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and denied transfer; Digital Envoy answered and counterclaimed, attaching trademark registrations, indicating trademark/Lanham Act and related business claims rather than pure patent counts. The case was dismissed in January 2005 after a settlement agreement was filed. Separately, Digital Envoy sued Google in 2004 over geolocation patents, and Quova's contract with Google surfaced in discovery there.