DataSift, a company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter, Facebook and other social data sources, has raised $15.25 million in Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners with Northgate Capital and Daher Capital participating. This brings DataSift’s funding to $30 million.
For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations use DataSift to mine the Twitter fire hose of social data, as well as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums and online message boards. But what makes DataSift special is that it can sort through billions of social interactions then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative.
DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords and applies natural language processing to turn unstructured data into structured, digestible information. The company’s product allows companies of any size to define extremely complex filters, including location, gender, sentiment, language, and even influence based on Klout scores, to provide quick and very specific insight and analysis.
Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift, says that the company was all set on money, but had a lot of inbound interest from investors. He adds that revenue has been exploding, and growth has been “amazing.”
“We have the world’s best infrastructure in real-time, as well as historical processing of social data, and through our Series B funding, we now have the ability to take that infrastructure to the next level,” said Nick Halstead, Founder and CTO of DataSift in a release. “The promise of the DataSift platform lies in enabling our customers to bring together their private and public data and applying our powerful processing to that unstructured data. The ultimate goal of Big Data is drawing actionable insights from a combination of public and private data.”
The company says it now has almost 300 corporate customers, up from 200 just a quarter ago, across a wide variety of markets, including Fortune 500 and social technology companies, news organizations, consulting companies, and government agencies.
DataSift also recently debuted a number of new services to allow businesses to more easily integrate and analyze Social Data alongside their own business data. This service works with BI applications, databases, data warehousing platforms and other cloud services, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, MongoDB, CouchDB, FTP/SFTP, ElasticSearch and WebHooks.
To understand the scale of DataSift’s processing, the startup deals with 700 million data interactions a day with over 20,000 data streams. Currently, DataSift processes 2 to 3 terabytes of data a day, and the company says that the volume of data passing through the platform has tripled over the past year.
The new funding will be used to be expand infrastructure for managing data sources, as well as to launch new data sources. Bailey says that more companies want new sophisticated monitoring functions, and DataSift will be working on building out its platform. The company will also be scaling internationally and doubling down on hiring for sales, marketing and customer service.