Gigya offers a suite of services grouped as Connect (user registration), Collect (managing user data), and Convert (using that data for marketing and personalization). The company integrates social logins and is expanding the definition of identity to include payment, security, and hardware-driven authentication. Gigya's CEO described a strategic collaboration with Intel around "next generation consumer identity" and making user authentication more secure. Its tools are used by more than 700 customers, including NBC, Forbes, Tommy Hilfiger, and Barneys New York. The company processed more than 1 billion registrations and logins so far this year, demonstrating significant usage scale. This traction supports Gigya's position as a provider of cross-device identity and marketing infrastructure for publishers and brands. Gigya provides social infrastructure that lets businesses integrate social login, social graphs and plug-ins (comments, ratings, reviews, live chat) into their websites. Launched in 2006, the platform is used by roughly 700 businesses, including Wal‑Mart, DirecTV, RedBox, ABC and Adidas, and reaches about 1.5 billion unique mobile and desktop users per month. CEO Patrick Salyer says the company is bringing in "tens of millions in annual sales," with sales growth having tripled since 2011. Gigya has reorganized its product line into a 'Connected Consumer Management Suite' and plans to build new marketer-facing tools that unlock social identity and behavior data. The company recently hired its first CFO, Paul Farmer, and intends to use new capital to expand domestic and international sales and marketing teams at its Mountain View headquarters and to open offices in Phoenix. Its product focus and enterprise push aim to help brands manage consumer data and extract more value from permission-based identity information. Gigya provides an all-in-one SaaS social infrastructure suite of plug-ins (comments, ratings, reviews, live chat, news feeds, social login, sharing, and gamification) that integrates users' social graphs into companies' sites. The company reports rapid commercial traction with over 500 customers and its technology reaching more than one billion unique users per month; sales more than tripled year-over-year and average deal size has doubled. Revenues are growing and the CEO said the latest raise was intended to scale operations rather than cover cash shortfalls; Gigya expects sales to triple again in 2012. It counts customers including ABC, CBS, Pepsi, Verizon, Home Depot, White Castle, and PlayStation, and works with 40 of the top 100 U.S. web properties. Gigya is expanding into Europe, recently opening new headquarters in London and signing customers like the London Evening Standard, The Independent, and Goal.com. The company plans to grow headcount (about 120 employees now) by another 50–60 hires and to accelerate efforts into eCommerce and gamification markets. Gigya offers two core products: Wildfire, a platform for widget developers to post and share creations, and Socialize, which provides sites with tools to incorporate social-networking features. Wildfire already serves 1,000 widget makers and generates revenue by circulating branded widgets from companies such as Disney and Kimberly‑Clark. Socialize aggregates friend data from sites like Facebook and MySpace and exposes an open API that lets sites engineer custom social features, which Gigya says gives it an edge over Google Friend Connect. Gigya predicts Socialize will soon surpass Wildfire in value as more sites adopt social networking features. The Palo Alto company has raised $23.5M since its 2006 inception and was valued at $26M after its last round in March, according to VCExperts.com. The article also notes Gigya receives more “company friendly” financing terms than rival Widgetbox, a factor that could give it a long-term advantage in a faltering economy. Gigya builds an 'embed this' widget — a simple tabbed menu that lets users post embed code to their pages by entering credentials and that works with Facebook applications. Its product enables distribution, tracking, and monetization of widgets across 12 social sites. Gigya has been chosen to handle distribution and tracking for six of the top ten widget properties (RockYou!, PictureTrail, BunnyHeroLabs, BlingyBlob.com, POQbum and Projectplaylist.com). Those six partners have a combined audience of 193 million unique visitors. Gigya is positioned to enable large widget publishers to achieve low-friction adoption on social sites, a strategy described as distinct from competitors like ClearSpring, which focuses on widgetizing content for any developer. The company recently closed a $2.4 million funding round with Benchmark and First Round Capital on June 25.

Total raised

$89M

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Nov 2014