DataSift Raises $42 Million to Fuel Continued Growth & Platform Innovation

SAN FRANCISCO, CA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - Dec 3, 2013) - DataSift, the platform that powers the social economy, announced today it has secured $42 million in Series C financing led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Northgate Capital, Daher Capital and Cendana Capital. The funding will accelerate the company's aggressive growth driven by its customer base of technology companies, enterprises and agencies.

Building on this momentum, DataSift will use the financing to increase investment in its market leading social data platform, continue expanding its global reach, invest in additional sales and marketing resources, further develop the social data ecosystem and expand into new data types, including internal enterprise data. The company has now raised more than $70 million to date.

"Social is generating billions of conversations every day and that data is fundamentally transforming the way companies communicate and make strategic decisions," commented Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift. "Social has now moved from mainstream to mission critical for enterprises and we are excited to power the applications in the social ecosystem and accelerate social data adoption."

Founded by Nick Halstead, with the goal of helping companies better understand and harness the power of social media, DataSift now powers over 1,000 corporate customers across 40 countries including enterprise leaders Bloomberg, Dow Jones, CBS Interactive and Dell and social technology application innovators Marketwired, Dachis Group, Conversocial, HootSuite and Simply Measured.

While companies realize the imperative to better interpret and extract meaning from social data to gain competitive advantage, it is difficult and complex to make sense of this massive unstructured data set. DataSift has built a highly scalable platform with the ability to easily capture, filter, enrich and deliver social data at scale to help companies quickly build applications, make better decisions and reduce the cost of working with social data.

In conjunction with the funding, DataSift announced the appointment of Insight Venture Partners co-founder and managing director Jeff Horing to the DataSift board of directors. Under his leadership, Insight has become a premier venture capital and private equity firm focused on growth investments in software and internet businesses; the firm has raised $7.6 billion since inception and made more than 190 investments worldwide including social media industry leaders Twitter, Tumblr, Buddy Media and HootSuite.

"DataSift fits with our mission of investing in visionary companies driving change and innovation", said Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight Venture Partners. "DataSift's technology enables real insight into customers, trends and products and we look forward to supporting management as they pioneer new ways of using social media and unstructured data to inform business decisions." 

"Our vision has always been about bringing together social data and business data to bring real understanding," noted Nick Halstead, founder and CTO of DataSift. "We are thrilled to be partnered with Jeff Horing and the Insight team to accelerate this process."

About DataSift

DataSift Inc. is the platform the powers the social economy, enabling companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. DataSift provides access to both real-time and historical social data to uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. Key investors include Insight Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures. DataSift has offices in San Francisco, New York City and Reading, U.K. For more information, visit www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.

About Insight Venture Partners

Insight Venture Partners is a leading global private equity and venture capital firm investing in software, eCommerce, Internet, and data-services companies. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $7.6 billion and made more than 190 investments worldwide. Insight's mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives who are driving change in their industries. Insight provides them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. For more information on Insight and all of its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com.