PeopleLinx Announces $3.2 Million In Series A Funding

PHILADELPHIA, March 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- PeopleLinx, the provider of the world's first LinkedIn engagement and analytics software, announced today that it raised $3.2 million in Series A funding led by Osage Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners and MissionOG. A number of strategic angel investors also participated in the oversubscribed round. The investment will be used to accelerate the company's growth and customer success with Fortune 1000 clients.

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"There is a very large and unaddressed market for third-party LinkedIn Social Business solutions like PeopleLinx, especially among organizations that already have hundreds or thousands of employees active on LinkedIn," said Nate Lentz, managing partner at Osage Venture Partners. "PeopleLinx is unique in its ability to enable enterprises to harness the potential of the combined social reach of their employees."

According to Ian Sigalow, partner and co-founder of Greycroft Partners, "LinkedIn has become the leading search tool for information about people and the companies they work for. PeopleLinx is raising the bar, helping our customers represent themselves online and manage their online reputations. The opportunity for PeopleLinx to create value for the enterprise within LinkedIn is similar to what we saw Buddy Media do in the early days of Facebook."

Founded in 2009 as a Social Business consulting company by former LinkedIn employees Nathan Egan and Patrick Baynes, PeopleLinx re-launched in early 2012 as a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to help corporations and their employees use LinkedIn. By providing dashboards to deliver best practice information, gaming functionality, detailed reporting and other tools needed to optimize their social presence, PeopleLinx helps enterprise employees in sales, marketing and human resources succeed in their roles.

Since their initial product launch in early 2012, PeopleLinx has seen rapid adoption by forward-thinking, vertical-market leaders, including Experian, FMC Corporation and Prudential. Fully customizable for each client, PeopleLinx fills a gap for the enterprise, helping them understand, among other things, their connectivity to key clients and target verticals. For LinkedIn itself, PeopleLinx is a significant driver of network health and performance metrics. With PeopleLinx, consumers spend more time-on-site, view more pages, add more profile data and grow their networks. PeopleLinx also promotes new account sign-ups and reactivations.

"In creating PeopleLinx, our goal was to build a solution that would be good for LinkedIn, good for companies and most importantly, good for employees," said Nathan Egan, chairman, CEO and founder of PeopleLinx. "With this strategic investment we can continue to scale our platform to meet the needs of our rapidly expanding customer base."

"We have worked closely with PeopleLinx over the past 18 months," commented George Krautzel, co-founder and general partner at MissionOG. "They have successfully transformed a compelling vision into a product that is delighting customers. Leadership has done a great job of building a talented team to embrace the opportunity with Social Business Optimization. PeopleLinx has the potential to be integrated into the workflow of every employee in the enterprise."

In conjunction with this financing, Dave Hanna from Hanna Ventures and Nate Lentz of Osage Venture Partners will join PeopleLinx's Board of Directors. Mr. Hanna recently served as chairman of Blue Coat Systems (acquired by Thoma Bravo) and chairman of Tropos Networks (acquired by ABB). Ian Sigalow of Greycroft Partners will join as an observer.

About PeopleLinx
PeopleLinx provides a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that empowers enterprise professionals to optimize their social presence and exceed their business goals using tools like LinkedIn. This customizable and flexible Social Business Optimization (SBO) software can quickly be deployed across the enterprise to provide employees with information about best practices, ongoing assessments, interactive tutorials, content libraries and other tools to help them be as effective as possible when navigating social networks for business. When integrated into the daily workflow, these features and capabilities produce tangible and measurable results across sales, marketing and human resources. For more information, please visit www.peoplelinx.com and follow them on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Osage Venture Partners
Osage Venture Partners (OVP) is a venture capital firm located just outside of Philadelphia, Pa. that invests in early-stage enterprise technology companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. OVP raised its first fund in 2005, and has invested almost exclusively in enterprise software companies since that time. With over $100M under management, OVP seeks to invest in determined and creative entrepreneurs and provide them with the assistance required to build high growth businesses. For more information, visit www.osagepartners.com

About Greycroft Partners
Greycroft Partners is a leading early stage venture capital firm focused on investments in digital media. With offices in the two media capitals of the world – New York and Los Angeles – Greycroft is uniquely positioned to serve entrepreneurs who have chosen us as their partners. We leverage our extensive network of media and technology industry connections to help our entrepreneurs gain visibility, build strategic relationships, successfully bring their products to market, and build successful businesses. Greycroft manages $400MM and has made over seventy investments in leading companies including Huffington Post, Paid Content, Buddy Media, Glam Media, Trunk Club, M5 Networks, Maker Studios, Viddy, Babble, Collective Media, Pulse, and Klout. For more information please visit the Greycroft Partners website at www.greycroft.com.

About MissionOG
Mission Operators Group provides human and financial capital to build B2B companies that have proven feasibility. MissionOG applies the capabilities of proven operators, instills a market driven approach to development, and leverages a highly engaged group of investors to help portfolio companies scale well beyond commercialization. Headquartered in the Philadelphia region, the MissionOG Fund is managed by entrepreneurial operators who have effectively built early-stage businesses and guided them through successful acquisition. www.missionog.com

For additional information, please contact:
Sarah Otterstetter
Davies Murphy Group, Inc.
+1-781-418-2416
[email protected]

SOURCE PeopleLinx