Tweet analyst DataSift raises $15m in series B funding

The investment was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from DataSift’s previous investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures, along with new investors Northgate Capital and Daher Capital.

To date, DataSift says that with this new funding, it has raised over $30m for its product development – $7.2m of which was invested in May.

As part of this latest funding round, Rory O’Driscoll, managing director of Scale Venture Partners, will be joining the board of directors at DataSift.

DataSift was founded in November 2010 by CTO Nick Halstead (who previously created TweetMeme, the makers of the original “Retweet” button). It works by curating and ranking links shared on Twitter based on their popularity to help companies understand what consumers are saying about their brand.

With the new capital, the company plans to hire engineers and develop technology that allows clients to send information from their internal social networks to DataSift, so that it can be filtered in a similar way to data from public social media sources.

Halstead said: “We have the world’s best infrastructure in real-time, as well as historical processing of social data, and through our Series B funding, we now have the ability to take that infrastructure to the next level.

“The promise of the DataSift platform lies in enabling our customers to bring together their private and public data and applying our powerful processing to that unstructured data. The ultimate goal of big data is drawing actionable insights from a combination of public and private data.”

DataSift says that it now has almost 300 corporate customers, up from 200 just a quarter ago. Its customers include Fortune 500 and social technology companies, news organisations, consulting companies, and government agencies. Subscriptions range from $3,000 to $15,000 per month, according to the company’s website.