Hootsuite provides a dashboard to monitor multiple social networks, publish messages, place ads, and run analytics across platforms. The service integrates with most major social platforms and recently added Instagram. It has expanded capabilities through acquisitions such as AdEspresso and partnerships with Adobe. Hootsuite began as a side project by co‑founder and CEO Ryan Holmes while he was running a marketing and advertising agency. The company is cash-flow positive and raised $50 million in non-dilutive credit financing from CIBC Innovation Banking, which it says will be primarily reserved for M&A. It plans to use the capital to accelerate acquisitions, expand in Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America, and to add tools for verticals including financial services, government, and healthcare. Hootsuite provides a platform for monitoring and managing social media interactions across roughly 35 networks, with functionality for both consumer power users and enterprise features like compliance, workflow and provisioning. The company reports north of 10 million users and about 1,600 enterprise customers, including 750 Fortune-1000 companies. Hootsuite says it is “intentionally cash-flow negative,” reinvesting earnings back into growth, and declined to disclose revenues. Management plans continued international expansion (noting growth in Latin America), ongoing product innovation, additional acquisitions, and a push into advertising targeted for Q4 or Q1. The company recently acquired campaign-planning tool BrightKit and announced the acquisition of Zeetl to add voice link capabilities to social interactions. Total disclosed funding for Hootsuite is now $250 million. HootSuite is a platform that lets enterprises manage social media accounts across multiple networks. Founded in 2008 and based in Vancouver, the company integrates roughly 56 social media services and maintains a close partnership with Twitter. It has more than 7 million users in over 175 countries, including 237 of the Fortune 500 and brands such as WWF, PepsiCo, Virgin, Fox and Sony Music. HootSuite reported revenues that grew 300% year‑over‑year for the same quarter and had been profitable previously; the company said it is now running cash‑flow neutral intentionally. The company operates a freemium model in which 96.5% of users are free and the remainder are paid, with over half of paid users having upgraded from free accounts. HootSuite plans to use new funding to expand globally, launch additional products, grow sales and marketing teams, and potentially make strategic acquisitions, with a particular focus on social advertising and advertising analytics. HootSuite offers a dashboard for monitoring multiple social networks, custom analytics, team collaboration, scheduled campaigns and mobile apps. It operates a freemium model with about 3.5 million registered accounts, the bulk on the free tier and a growing number of paid users across pro, enterprise, training (HootSuite University) and reseller offerings. The company reported an annual revenue run-rate of $11 million and counts customers including PepsiCo, Fox and the NBA. HootSuite has 140 employees and said it expects to grow headcount to roughly 240 this year to support product development and expansion. The company said the new investment gives it more breathing space to continue product development and growth, and CEO Ryan Holmes remains committed to building a billion-dollar company. After the transaction HootSuite was valued at $200 million. HootSuite offers a comprehensive social media dashboard that enables teams to collaboratively schedule and monitor updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and other networks via web, desktop and mobile platforms. The platform includes tools to track campaign results, analytics and other data for brands and businesses. In two years the company has grown to over 1.5 million users worldwide. The article states HootSuite is cash-flow positive. Recently the company acquired a Firefox add-on called TwitterBar to enable posting from the browser address bar. HootSuite was also the first application in which Twitter began testing its own in-stream ad product.

Total raised

$300M

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Debt Financing

Latest activity

Mar 2018