The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · Mar 2011

Visible Technologies offers the Visible Intelligence platform for social media monitoring and analytics. The platform is designed to harness business value from social communities by monitoring, targeting, prioritizing, engaging and measuring across social media. The company intends to use the $4M funding to enhance the social CRM capabilities of its platform and to further improve analytics, topic discovery, reporting and alerting. Founded in 2003 and led by CEO Kelly Pennock, Visible Technologies is based in Bellevue, Washington and also maintains offices in London and New York. Its customers and partners include DIRECTV, Microsoft, Xerox, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Boost Mobile, Autodesk and others. Backers on this round include existing investors Investor Growth Capital (ICF), Joe Grano and Ignition Partners. Visible Technologies is a social media monitoring company that provides clients a 360-degree view of social media chatter. It helps companies turn that data into actionable marketing and business strategies. The company announced it secured an additional $6 million in financing. The round was led by the company’s previous backers and named investors include Investor Growth Capital, Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel, and WPP. The financing brings Visible Technologies' total funding to $45 million to date. CEO Kelly Pennock wrote that Salesforce's purchase of Radian6 shows social media monitoring is going mainstream and validates the space. Visible Technologies offers a suite of social media monitoring and reputation-management products, including TruPulse, TruReputation and the TruVoice engagement platform. TruPulse crawls web sources—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and forums—to track conversations, analyze topics and sentiment, identify influencers, and surface trends via charts and reports. TruReputation assesses corporate reputation across search engines, social media and blogs by classifying references as positive or negative. The company integrates its platform with CRM systems such as Salesforce.com and Oracle, and its customer roster includes Microsoft, Xerox, Autodesk and Hormel. Founded in 2003, Visible is using its latest funding to invest in product development and engineering and to expand into international markets. Following the Series C, the startup has raised a total of $34 million. Visible competes with firms including Radian6, Scout Labs and ViralHeat. Visible Technologies builds software that helps corporations monitor and respond to online conversations about their brands. Its two main products are TruCast, which crawls blogs and forums to analyze topic and sentiment and surface influencers, hot spots, and trends, and TruView, which examines search results to assess whether references are positive or negative. The TruCast system can route conversations to PR teams for response and offers dynamic charts and statistical reports to track mentions over time. The company was founded in 2003. Financially, Visible announced a $12 million Series B in the article and previously took a Series A from WPP in July 2006 (size undisclosed). The article also notes WPP acquired 25% of Visible for $3.5 million in 2006 with an option to buy an additional 26%.

Led · Equity · May 2010

The Hotlist aggregates geo-social data from sources like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp to show users what’s happening among their friends and around them. Its platform presents maps, venue lists, friend attendance, past and future events, real-time venue information, reviews and venue analytics. The service launched its public beta in March after being founded in September 2009 and operates from the New York City–sponsored 160 Varick Street incubator. The company reports around 100,000 unique visitors per month and has collected data from over 400,000 venues and 1.2 million upcoming events. The Hotlist plans to use new funding to launch full mobile integration (iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps) and to support ongoing platform development. Early support included a $25,000 seed grant from the NYU Stern Business Plan Competition, awarded to the company as the first undergraduate team winner.