Wildfire is a social marketing platform founded in 2008 that helps brands run campaigns and manage presences across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It began as a Facebook contests and sweepstakes tool and in 2011 launched a multi-function marketing suite aimed at higher-margin SaaS customers. The company reported 13,000 paying customers and grew from 7 to about 300 employees since early 2010; it has powered roughly 200,000 marketing campaigns. TechCrunch estimates Wildfire's 2011 revenues between $35 million and $45 million, with international business growing 500% to 24% of revenue and 30 of the world's 50 most valuable brands as customers. Wildfire relies on lower-priced monthly campaign clients as well as subscription customers and partners with Adaptly for Facebook ads rather than owning an ads platform, which affects margin potential. The company recently hired CMO Doug Laird and faces a strategic challenge of monetizing its large customer base toward more full-suite SaaS deals. Wildfire provides a platform that helps marketers create branded social media campaigns such as sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, quizzes and virtual gift campaigns. Its tools publish campaigns simultaneously to Facebook fan pages, company websites (integrated with Facebook Connect) and Twitter. Wildfire launched its offering last year as an fbFund company and has won the fbFund twice. The company reached profitability within one month of launching its product. Wildfire has built a high-profile client roster including Pepsi, Sony, CNN, Universal, AT&T, Victoria’s Secret and Facebook. The startup raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Summit Partners with participation from Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk. The investment will be used for product development initiatives.

Total raised

$14M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Mar 2012