New York investor Insight Venture Partners has joined a growing pool of existing investors at DataSift as part of Series C round.
Reading-based DataSift is a social data platform which allows companies to aggregate, filter and extract information from public social conversations on Twitter.
The funds it has received through the Series C round will be put to work expanding its customer base of technology companies and agencies.
The company’s funding efforts began in January 2010 when it raised $1.5 million of seed investment through David Richmond. It then followed this up with a split Series A round netting it $6 million in July 2011 and $7.2 million in April 2012. Its Series B transaction back in November 2012 brought in $15 million.
Two years ago, company founder and current CTO Nick Halstead relinquished his position as chief executive of DataSift, in an effort to better the business.
Insight Venture Partners, which has portfolio companies such as Flipboard, Hootsuite and Twitter, joins existing investors including Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Northgate Capital, Daher Capital and Cendana Capital.
Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift, says that social has now moved from mainstream to what he calls ‘mission critical ‘ for enterprises.
‘We are excited to power the applications in the social ecosystem and accelerate social data adoption,’ he adds.
As part of the deal, Insight Venture Partners co-founder and managing director Jeff Horing will join the board of DataSift to help with growth.
Horing says, ‘DataSift fits with our mission of investing in visionary companies driving change and innovation.
‘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.’
As well as building out its customer base, the $42 million will reportedly help with investing in sales and marketing resources and expanding into new data types such as internal enterprise data.
Joanna Shields, CEO of Tech City UK and former head of Europe for Facebook, has added her thoughts to the new funding, and says, ‘We are living through an amazing period of technology-driven creativity and innovation, and the conditions are just right for producing increasing numbers of high-growth businesses like DataSift.’
