Visible gets another $6m from investors after Radian6 sale

Among those contributing to the financing round were marketing services group WPP and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. $45m has been pumped into Visible to date.

The extra investment should help the company as it faces the prospect of stiffer competition in the social media monitoring space from Radian6, which was bought by CRM software giant Salesforce in a $326m deal earlier this week.

Responding to the acquisition in a blog post, Visible CEO Kelly Pennock said it “raises the stakes for existing social media monitoring vendors”.

“The most viable vendors in this space will need to deliver scale, performance, quality and reliability – all the things that big companies and technology giants of the Salesforce ilk will require of partners,” Pennock said. “The deal may very well hasten the coming shake up, since many vendors in this space won’t be able to deliver against those demands, but in the end, the impact will be healthy.”

Pennock said Visible’s extra financing will be used to support the uptake of its Visible Intelligence platform, which was launched in November and is designed to operate “at internet scale and velocity and to provide social insights with the power to dramatically improve business results”.

The company made a push into Europe last May with the launch of a London office, fresh off a previous round of funding.