DataSift has announced it has secured $42 million in Series C financing led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Northgate Capital, Daher Capital and Cendana Capital.
The funding will accelerate the company’s growth driven by its customer base of technology companies, enterprises and agencies.
Building on this momentum, DataSift said it will use the financing to increase investment in its social data platform, continue expanding its market reach, invest in additional sales and marketing resources, further develop the social data ecosystem and expand into new data types, including internal enterprise data. The company has now raised more than $70 million to date.
"Social is generating billions of conversations every day and that data is fundamentally transforming the way companies communicate and make strategic decisions, " said Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift. "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."
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; the firm has raised $7.6 billion since inception and made more than 190 investments worldwide including social media industry playersTwitter, Tumblr, Buddy Media and HootSuite.
"DataSift fits with our mission of investing in visionary companies driving change and innovation", said Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight Venture Partners. "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."
"Our vision has always been about bringing together social data and business data to bring real understanding", noted Nick Halstead, founder and CTO of DataSift. "We are thrilled to be partnered with Jeff Horing and the Insight team to accelerate this process."
