DataSift, a social data platform that provides brands and enterprises with access to content from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and dozens of other social networks, is today announcing a $42 million, Series C round of funding. Rob Bailey, DataSift's CEO, tells me that the company plans to use the new financing for a number of different purposes.
First up is international expansion, starting initially with Japan, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and Indonesia. DataSift also plans to add more data partners; and to expand into what Bailey calls “non-social” data sources - which can include messaging and gaming services, enterprise collaboration platforms and more. DataSift has seen a “huge amount of inbound interest” for data from these sources, he says.
Insight Venture Partners - the VC firm that has backed Twitter, Snapchat, Buddy Media, HootSuit and a number of other leading social startups - led the round with existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Northgate Capital and Daher Capital also participating. As part of the round, IVP's co-founder and MD Jeff Horing is joining DataSift's board of directors.
DataSift has now raised just under $72 million.
Bailey and DataSift are not providing a post-funding valuation, but considering that another player in the data firehose game, Topsy, has just sold to Apple for reportedly over $200 million, and DataSift is "considerably" bigger in size, it may well be a number well north of that.
Since being founded in 2010 in the UK, DataSift has been riding a veritable social media tsunami. A swathe of popular (and free) services like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr attract billions of users, who use the sites daily to post messages to each other and read what others have to say. That rush of consumers and their opinions are of huge interest to advertisers and others for obvious reasons, yet most of that data is unstructured and therefore hard to “read”. DataSift therefore provides a way for those enterprises to make better use of that data from these social media platforms: each piece of data gets tagged with metadata, which can then be used in different applications to chart what people are talking about, gain insight on different trends, and so on.
DataSift says that its 1,000 corporate customers today cover 40 countries and include Bloomberg, Dow Jones, CBS Interactive and Dell and social technology application innovators Marketwired, Dachis Group, Conversocial, SecondSync, HootSuite and Simply Measured.
The move to looking for new business in international markets makes sense for DataSift, Baily says, because they are the markets “where we see the biggest amount of social activity, yet are the most underserved.”
Unsurprisingly, DataSift ate a little of its own dogfood when selecting what countries it would target first. “We did a lot of sophisticated analysis internally,” he says. “We looked at aggregated social and local networks and the size of the advertising and business intelligence markets in these countries.” And in a sense the infrastructure for growth is already in place: the company already provides detection on its platform for 150 different languages, and is built for scaling. “Right out of the gate, it will be an incredibly easy path for us to enter Brazil, for example,” he says.
I also asked him about Japan. There, a lot of the buzz has been around messaging platform Line, which is more of a private, direct service than the one-to-many nature of networks like Twitter and Tumblr. In these sorts of scenarios, it's likely that messaging companies might tap DataSift for competitive intelligence of their own platform for their own commercial development, CTO Nick Halstead tells me. Still, the two would not comment on Line directly. “We have not announced a deal with Line yet,” Bailey said. “We cannot comment on deals that have not been announced but I think Line is one the most important data sources in Japan, along with some other ones.” (My interpretation: watch this space.)
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