Sprinklr just announced that it has raised $46 million in new funding, at what it says is a valuation of more than $1 billion.
The round was led by existing investors Battery Ventures, Intel Capital, and Iconiq Capital and brings the company’s total funding to $123.5 million. (Sprinklr’s last funding of $40 million was announced just under a year ago.)
The company is also officially launching its Experience Cloud, a platform that connects its existing social media management tools (with capabilities like publishing, advertising, and analytics) with what Mark Curtis, the company’s general manager of brand advocacy, called the “first-party experience” — namely, building communities and forums on your own website.
Curtis and other members of the Sprinklr team gave me a quick demo of the Experience Cloud, showing that it’s easy to build a website with drag-and-drop social widgets. However, the key piece that Curtis emphasized wasn’t the website builder, but rather the way that Sprinklr can then connect customer data across “all the different touch points that make up the brand experience.”
For example, if someone logs into a brand’s web community, the brand could pull data from social networks and personalize the content the user sees accordingly. Brands can also look at dashboards showing the activity of each customer across all their different platforms, and import the information into their sales databases.
“If [customers] are coming to our site and telling us who they are, let’s not be the goldfish that has no memory,” Curtis said. “Let’s use that information to provide the best customer experience possible.”
Curtis, by the way, joined Sprinklr last fall through the acquisition of Branderati. The company has actually made four other acquisitions in the past 12 months — Dachis Group, TBG, and Pluck.
Expanding through acquisitions has become standard practice for social media companies, but Curtis said:
When we bought TBG, we didn’t use a line of their code, and we didn’t use a line of Branderati code. All that functionality was added to the core Sprinklr code, and it’s the same for Pluck … The sustainable advantage that we have in terms of the Experience Cloud is that it’s not a cloud of cobbled together things.