Social Data Platform Company DataSift Secures $7.2 Million in Funding

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - May 2, 2012) - DataSift (http://www.datasift.com/), the social data platform company, today announced that it has secured $7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures. DataSift will use the funding to accelerate company growth in response to the overwhelming demand received for its real-time and historics social data platform. The company also announced its move into a new office in San Francisco's SOMA district, a hotbed for innovative start-ups.

"DataSift has been flooded with interest from both customers and investors since our launch in November. We are seeing incredible demand from a wide variety of sectors of customers, including Social Media Monitoring, Business Intelligence, News and Finance," said Rob Bailey, CEO. "While we were not actively looking for financing, we were lucky to receive a fantastic offer from our existing investors that will enable us to continue building our business without the distraction of raising a funding round. GRP and IA Ventures have been amazing to work with. They've been instrumental in helping us achieve the success we've had so far and we are excited to continue working with them."

As a Big Data platform for social data, DataSift aggregates billions of social interactions from over a million public social data sources such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums and online message boards. The company's recent integration with NewsCred has also extended its ability to monitor not just social media, but also news articles, to understand how the news spreads through the social web.

DataSift's powerful platform evaluates each social interaction from multiple dimensions, applying natural language processing to turn unstructured data into structured, digestible information ready for analysis to identify sentiment, trending web-links, location, social influence and topics. These capabilities provide an unprecedented ability for companies to filter social data, extract meaning and create actionable insights. In its first five months since commercial launch, DataSift has signed up close to 200 corporate customers.

"DataSift demonstrates the potential for Big Data to transform an industry. The customer interest that DataSift has received since launch has been truly impressive and signals even greater things ahead," said Roger Ehrenberg, founder and managing partner, IA Ventures. "We're doubling-down on DataSift to enable them to grow faster to respond to the clear market demand."

"The explosion of Social Data is creating a flood of information that 99 percent of companies are unprepared to handle and respond to," said Mark Suster, partner, GRP Partners. "By delivering a platform to manage the heavy-lifting in social, DataSift is tackling one of the most pressing problems in the industry today."

"Social Data and Big Data are combining to create capabilities that seemed impossible just a few years ago," said Nick Halstead, founder. "Every week, DataSift aggregates, enriches and delivers billions of social interactions. The challenge we've focused on is not just scale, but ease of use for developers, entrepreneurs and enterprises. Doing simple is hard work -- it's great to see the positive response we're getting from the market."

For more information, visit www.datasift.com.

About DataSift
DataSift Inc. is a social data platform company, enabling enterprises and entrepreneurs to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. Through a licensing agreement with Twitter, DataSift provides companies with both real-time and historical Tweets to filter and uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. DataSift is an on-demand platform with a flexible pricing scale that makes enterprise-level data accessible to companies of any size. DataSift has offices in San Francisco and Reading, U.K. It has received investment from IA Ventures (Roger Ehrenberg), a fund that is focused exclusively on Big Data, and from GRP Partners (Mark Suster). For more information, visit http://www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.