Led · Series A · Feb 2017

NewsWhip is a real-time media monitoring platform based in Dublin and New York, led by CEO Paul Quigley. Its platform predicts the stories and topics that will matter in the hours ahead, helping communications professionals make quick, confident decisions. The product is used to predict the news, unpack crises and issues, and understand which stories are engaging audiences on global and local scales. Customers include PepsiCo, Google, Tinder, ConAgra, Samsung, McDonald’s, Walmart, ABInBev, the Associated Press, Condé Nast, the Washington Post, and NGOs such as Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Health Organization. NewsWhip raised $13M in funding and intends to use the proceeds to expand operations and its business reach. NewsWhip offers a SaaS platform that transforms data from stories, videos, and social posts into actionable insights to inform content strategy. Its technology scans the world’s social media activity every two minutes and compares that activity to millions of pieces of content to identify what is spreading fastest and overperforming. The company serves clients including Associated Press, BuzzFeed, MTV, Edelman, and Bauer. Led by CEO Paul Quigley, NewsWhip plans to use the new funding to continue developing its platform. The company is based in New York City and Dublin, EIRE. The announcement frames the Series A as support for product development rather than specific operational metrics or revenue figures. NewsWhip provides a social content discovery platform called Spike. Spike tracks social network activity around millions of stories daily, giving newsrooms, marketers and PR professionals real-time indicators such as tweets, shares and comments. The platform detects articles, videos, Facebook posts and other content and predicts what will matter in hours or days. The company is led by CEO Paul Quigley and is based in Dublin, Ireland. NewsWhip raised over $1.6M in funding to develop the next generation of its platform—improving tracking, predicting and understanding capabilities—and to grow its New York business development team. NewsWhip is a Dublin-headquartered breaking news aggregator whose core product, Spike, identifies and surfaces stories gaining real engagement for journalists, editors, producers, and marketers. The company stores vast volumes of social data and captures hundreds of social data points and metadata for every piece of content to map what it calls the "genome of social distribution." It reports newsroom clients in 12 countries, plus freelancers, small publishers, agencies, and some brands focused on content marketing. NewsWhip will use the new funding to continue developing Spike and to update its main website and Android and iPhone apps. The company also plans to expand geographically, opening a New York office this month and hiring a New York-based sales and communications team. NewsWhip surfaces the latest news by aggregating social signals (tweets and Facebook Likes) from the broader crowd rather than a user’s personal social graph. The company operates a consumer-facing service and has redesigned its site while preparing native mobile and tablet apps. NewsWhip also offers a professional product called Spike, a newsroom dashboard that shows which stories are trending or about to trend; Spike is being trialled with newsrooms and is intended to be subscription-based. Spike was developed with input from the BBC, MSNBC, BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Co-founder Paul Quigley has described the product as emphasizing what everyone is sharing across topics to avoid the echo chamber of an individual’s social graph. The company is Dublin-based and has already participated in the NDRC Launchpad program.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2014

PageFair provides analytics and advertising tools that help publishers monitor and counteract adblocking on websites. The company’s core product detects adblock usage and offers publishers ways to respond. Founded in 2012 and based in Dublin, Ireland, PageFair is used by over 1,000 publishers worldwide. The founding team includes Sean Blanchfield (CEO), Brian McDonnell (CTO) and Neil O'Connor (COO). PageFair raised financing and intends to use the funds to establish operations in the US. The article does not disclose revenue or other financial metrics beyond publisher count.