It is with great excitement that I write to announce that Buddy Media has raised $54 million in Series D funding. The official announcement can be found here.
We believe this financing is very powerful market validation of our strategy and team, sustained revenue growth, and large, growing market opportunity. The investors who competed to invest in Buddy Media are not just any investors. They are real business builders.
Four premier venture capital firms invested in this round: GGV Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Institutional Venture Partners and Bay Partners.
GGV’s portfolio includes household names such as Pandora, SuccessFactors and Alibaba Group. Institutional Venture Partners has funded 300 companies since its inception, including Twitter and Zynga. Insight Venture Partners, investing from their recently raised $1.5bn fund, has other social media investments in companies like 6waves LOLapps, Flipboard and Twitter. And Bay Partners has had more than 250 successful exits (IPOs or $250M+ acquisitions) during the past 35 years and has been investing around open social graph APIs since 2007.
We are in the midst of a massive shift online from a search and intent-based world to a social, people-based world. The last three years were about the consumer side of social platforms, as we watched Facebook, Zynga and Twitter grow exponentially. The next three years will about the enterprise side of social, and how companies engage and grow their businesses by tapping into these massive platforms. Buddy Media plans to help accelerate this movement by providing our clients easy-to-use and powerful tools to help them tap into these social platforms to increase revenues, find new customers, and build deeper relationships with current customers and more.
All of the money we have raised is going directly into the company (versus being used to buy out existing shareholders). We plan to double our product, sales and support staff in the next year as well as fund additional global offices and acquisitions.
I couldn’t be more proud of our Buddies and what we’ve accomplished over the last year. Here are some of the highlights:
- We added close to 200 new customers in 2011, including some of the world’s most recognizable global brands, retailers and media companies such as Ford Motor Company, Hanes, ESPN, Hearst Corporation, and Virgin Mobile USA.
- Our revenue has more than doubled since the end of 2010.
- We’ve maintained a net promoter score of 75 in 2011.
- Employee headcount has grown from 40 employees in 2009 to almost 200, with continued massive hiring plans for 2011 and beyond.
- We acquired social commerce and analytics leader Spinback in May 2011 and plans to complete its integration and roll out this month (a record for integration!).
- We recently hired Dennis Morgan as Chief Financial Officer. While at Yahoo!, Morgan led corporate finance efforts for more than $5 billion in acquisitions and business development deals .
- We opened our European Headquarters in London last month and hired Luca Benini, a senior executive from Comscore, as Managing Director, Europe.
- We won the TechCrunch “Crunchie” Award for Best Enterprise application in January 2011.
- WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, announced a $5 million investment and global partnership with Buddy Media in October 2010.
We now have the resources to grow a very large, independent company.
Thank you Buddies, partners and investors. You all make it possible for Buddy Media to continue our growth and expansion. And a big thanks to our hundreds of clients who trust us to make social media and social marketing work for their businesses. We plan to continue to innovate in this space and nothing we do could be possible without our clients.
With this funding, you can rest assured that we will be around as a large and independent company for many, many years to come, while continuing to lead the way in social media.
