Participated · Series A · Jul 2016

Influential builds social intelligence and activation tools that leverage AI (it is a developer partner with IBM Watson) to help brands and marketers find and activate influencers. Its Talent Pro product gives agencies like WME access to social data on a broader pool of talent, enabling deals that surround A-list celebrities with lookalike influencers. The company also offers a social intelligence product for competitive and audience insights and is working to map paid influencer posts to real-world consumer actions. Influential announced a $12 million Series B that included WME and existing investors Capital Zed, ECA Ventures, Paradigm Talent Agency, ROAR and Tech Coast Angels. With this round the company has now raised a total of $26.5 million. CEO Ryan Detert positions influencer marketing as one tactic within a broader social intelligence and activation offering aimed at both agencies and brands. Influential is a technology platform and social media influencer network powered by the cognitive computing capabilities of IBM Watson. The platform works with more than 7,000 top influencers across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine and YouTube, representing more than 4.4 billion followers. Influencers are activated via a patent-pending app to run brand campaigns and create targeted conversations using age, gender, interests, ethnicity and more than 60,000 data points. The company plans to use the $5M Series A to ramp up hires and allocate resources toward developers, data scientists and data partners. The round was led by Capital Zed and included participation from Roar, Paradigm Talent Agency, Europlay Capital Advisors, MSMCi, Ace Fund and several angel investors. Influential operates from Beverly Hills, New York City and Las Vegas and is led by CEO and Co-Founder Ryan Detert; it has raised $9M to date. Influential operates a mobile-first marketplace that non-exclusively represents roughly 1,000 online influencers and connects them with about 25 brands or agencies. Brands post offers with messaging, legal requirements, and deliverable parameters; Influential selects 20–100 influencers to respond and collects submissions via APIs. The company bills itself as “100 percent brand-safe” because brands directly convey requirements and receive final submissions. Influential enforces a minimum brand spend of $50,000 for engagements and compares its model to competitors that act more like agencies or use different pricing approaches. CEO and cofounder Ryan Detert and cofounder/COO Dan Steele built the platform from Detert’s own influencer background. The new funding will be used for further platform development and sales efforts, and the company is undertaking a new round on FlashFunders.