Twitter data sifter gets $7.2m investment
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US— Datasift hit the headlines in February when it became the first company to licence two years’ worth of Twitter data for market research analysis. Now it has raised $7.2m in funding.
CEO Rob Bailey said the social data company wasn’t “actively looking” for financing, but instead had received an offer from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures for a follow-on Series A round.
The funds will support the continued growth of the business, which launched in November and has attracted 200 customers to date. On launching the Historics service – which aggregates and filters data collected from archived tweets and delivers it into social media monitoring, business intelligence and CRM applications – the company said it had 1,000 other firms on a waiting list.
Alongside Twitter, Datasift also analyses social media data from 20 other sources including YouTube, blogs and forums.
Bailey said: “We’re seeing everything from business intelligence, stock-trading models, public health applications and social TV guides being built with Datasift.
“A big part of [the founder] Nick Halstead’s vision has always been to democratise the social data market – opening it to both small and large companies,” he said. “We’re starting to see this play out.”
