As the need to curate and filter vast amounts of data generated by social media gets bigger, one of the leading providers, DataSift, announced today it has secured $42 million in Series C financing from a group of venture capital and private equity firms led by Insight Venture Partners. As per the official press release by DataSift today, the deal was structured with the aim to accelerate the company’s aggressive growth driven by its customer base of technology companies, enterprises and agencies.
Participation in the Funding Round included funding from existing investors, Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Northgate Capital, Daher Capital and Cendana Capital, as per the press release.
Building on this momentum, DataSift will use the financing to increase investment in its market leading social data platform, continue expanding its global reach, invest in additional sales and marketing resources, further develop the social data ecosystem and expand into new data types, including internal enterprise data.
Filtering Social for Finance, and other Industries
Rob Bailey, CEO, DataSift
Commenting in the official corporate press release from DataSift, Rob Bailey, the firm's CEO said,“Social is generating billions of conversations every day and that data is fundamentally transforming the way companies communicate and make strategic decisions."
Mr.Bailey added in his statement, “Social has now moved from mainstream to mission critical for enterprises and we are excited to power the applications in the social ecosystem and accelerate social data adoption.”
Originally founded by Nick Halstead, with the goal of helping companies better understand and harness the power of social media, DataSift now powers over 1,000 corporate customers across 40 countries including enterprise leaders Bloomberg, Dow Jones, CBS Interactive and Dell and social technology application innovators Marketwired, Dachis Group, Conversocial, HootSuite and Simply Measured, according to the announcement.
Solid Backing: Funding & Human Capital
The company has now raised more than $70 million to date, and has offices in Reading (U.K), NY and California, where its solution enables companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources using both real-time and historical social data to uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion.
Jeff Horing, InsightVenture Partners co-founder and managing director,and on board of directors of DataSift
In conjunction with the funding, DataSift announced the appointment of Insight Venture Partners co-founder and managing director, Jeff Horing to the DataSift board of directors.
Under his leadership, Insight has become a premier venture capital and private equity firm focused on growth investments in software and internet businesses, as per the company description. According to the release, Insight raised $7.6 billion since inception and has made more than 190 investments worldwide, including social media industry leaders Twitter, Tumblr, Buddy Media and HootSuite.
Nick Halstead, Founder and CTO, DataSift
Commenting in the official press release today, Mr. Horing said,“DataSift fits with our mission of investing in visionary companies driving change and innovation,” and added, “DataSift’s technology enables real insight into customers, trends and products and we look forward to supporting management as they pioneer new ways of using social media and unstructured data to inform business decisions.”
DataSift's Founder and CTO, Nick Halstead added in the official press release concerning the deal, “Our vision has always been about bringing together social data and business data to bring real understanding.”
Mr. Halstead concluded, “We are thrilled to be partnered with Jeff Horing and the Insight team to accelerate this process.”
Social Data Aggregation and Curation Landscape via Search
Following the IPO of Twitter, Forex Magnates has written about several companies that look to harness the power of social media by filtering it for finance. This follows Apple’s acquisition of Topsy which enabled it to enter the search space and effectively further compete on that front with leading rival Google.
One of the largest data-sifting providers, GNIP, also an authorized reseller of the complete Twitter firehose, makes up the growing market share of companies that are helping to propagate both the needs and the drivers of social curation services through managed public api-access and enterprise solutions.
Cynan Rhodes, Co-Founder, FSWIRE
Another eager contender, FSwire, which specializes in curating Twitter for finance specifically, interviewed and wrote about previously by Forex Magnates, was contacted during a call today from our research team concerning the DataSift deal.
Sharing his opinion regarding the news from DataSift, Cynan Rhodes, Co-Founder of FSwire said:
"Apple buying Topsy and Datasift's $42m series C round have put a sizeable valuation on understanding real-time data, following twitter's IPO. All these highlight that value from within social data which is maturing since the underlying real value is in understanding what is happening in the world, to your company or to your users as fast as possible - and faster than your competitor. The Datasift's round of $42m helps puts a price on this value."
