Insight leads $42m round for Datasift

Ellie Pullen
06 December 2013

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Insight Venture Partners has led a $42m series-C funding round for Datasift, a UK- and US-based social data platform provider, alongside several existing investors.

Investing alongside Insight were previous backers Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Northgate Capital, Daher Capital and new backer Cendana Capital – meaning the consortium is composed almost entirely of US investors. Daher is a Lebanese family office.

The substantial capital injection will allow Datasift to further develop its social data platform, as well as expand internationally. The company will also look into incorporating new data types into its platform, such as internal enterprise data.

This latest funding round brings the total amount raised by Datasift to more than $70m.

Previous funding
In July 2011, Datasift raised $6m in its series-A round from IA and Upfront (formerly GRP Partners). This was followed by a $7.2m series-A extension from the two firms in May 2012.

Datasift's series-B round took place in November last year and was led by new investor Scale. Existing backers IA and Upfront contributed to the $15m funding round, which also saw new backers Northgate and Daher join the consortium.

Company
Founded in 2010, Datasift has offices in Reading in the UK, and San Francisco and New York in the US. The company employs approximately 100 staff and reportedly generates annual turnover in the region of $25m.

Datasift has developed a big-data platform that uses data-filtering technology, designed to aid organisations in managing and understanding raw data gleaned from social media.

The company consolidates raw data from a large range of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogging platforms, which is then standardised to allow for analysis and filtering. Datasift's platform can extract data by filtering from several categories such as the sentiment, company, product or links mentioned by a social media user, as well as the demographics of users.

People
Datasift was founded by CTO Nick Halstead. Rob Bailey is the company's CEO. Insight co-founder and managing director Jeff Horing joined the company's board of directors.