Socialbakers Completes $26 Million Growth Financing for International Expansion and Innovation

LONDON, PRAGUE, and NEW YORK, February 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Series C round is one of the largest for a social analytics company outside North America

Socialbakers, the leading worldwide social media analytics and optimization company, has completed a $26 million Series C financing round, one of the largest funding rounds for a social analytics company outside North America. This new funding led by Index Ventures, with existing investor Earlybird participating, validates Socialbakers' status as the leading provider of SaaS-based, enterprise social analytics on a global scale.

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Socialbakers' vision is to become the international standard for the way social media marketing is measured and optimized. With an international client base that includes half of all Fortune 500 companies, Socialbakers will dedicate this latest investment to new product development and strengthening client support, sales and marketing in the USA, as well as other markets around the world.

"Social is defining the future of marketing, said Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, but marketers don't have the insights they need into social behavior to make the right decisions. Socialbakers is uniquely positioned to deliver the much needed insights into content, engagement and advertising that enables marketers to succeed in social marketing. This funding will further establish our authority in social analytics, publishing and advertising to brands and agencies based in the USA, and globally.

"Socialbakers has successfully met the demands of an accelerating roster of clients in need of intelligent solutions to better measure, manage and produce social marketing campaigns," said Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures. "With an executive team that comprises both the dynamic, disruptive vision of co-founder and CEO Jan Rezab with C-Suite expertise from industry veterans, Socialbakers is positioned to move from leading the social analytics category, to defining the next generation of insight- driven social marketing applications."

The social analytics SaaS category has seen exponential growth in the past year, with a surge of venture capital interest and headline-grabbing acquisitions as the demand for tools that helps enterprises understand and act on their brand perception in social media. Socialbakers has seen rapid growth internationally as this demand for insight grows with clients wanting to measure hundreds of social properties spread across multiple platforms, countries and industries.

"With its strong revenue growth and phenomenal customer success rate, Socialbakers has quickly established itself as a market leader in brand awareness and social content performance metrics, and we are excited to support its expansion and continued growth with this new funding round," said Jason Whitmire, Partner at Earlybird.

With one million visits per month Socialbakers.com is the leading global portal for social marketing insights. It has become the standard in social marketing efficacy through its quarterly Socially Devoted benchmarks of the world's leading brands across more than 100 countries.  These insights are widely used by social media marketing managers, agencies, and researchers to define strategies, benchmark performance against competitors and the global community, and to spot consumer trends and customer service areas for improvement.

Socialbakers has been on an upward trajectory since its founding in 2009. In the past 12 months the company:

• Grew revenue three-fold in 2013
• Launched of Socialbakers AdAnalytics, a social ad management platform, that enables marketers to unlock the full potential of social platforms like Facebook by analyzing, managing and optimizing social ads.
• Added more than 1,000 new clients in 12 months, including Samsung, LVMH, Discovery, Disney, and Universal.
• Appointed digital industry veterans Neil Morgan, CMO (formerly Omniture, Adobe) and Neil Weston, COO (formerly Omniture, Nuance) to drive its global expansion.
• Doubled employee headcount from 150 to 300 with plans to expand to more than 400 in 2014 with more than 30 languages
• Opened offices in New York, Singapore, Paris and Munich

To view the latest Socially Devoted rankings from Socialbakers, go to http://sociallydevoted.socialbakers.com/

About Socialbakers
Socialbakers is an enterprise social media analytics platform which enables brands to measure, compare, and contrast the success of their social media campaigns with competitive intelligence. Since 2009 Socialbakers has innovated enabling companies to measure and maximize the effectiveness of their social marketing campaigns across all major social networks.

Socialbakers is the only analytics platform that provides truly global industry benchmarks together with extensive local categorization of brands social properties. Socialbakers has been a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer since 2011.

For more information, visit http://www.socialbakers.com  and follow @Socialbakers .

Contact:
Alexandra Banks
Director, Global Public Relations
[email protected]
@alexandrabanks
+44(0)7876-408400

SOURCE Socialbakers