European social media analytics firm Socialbakers has secured a $2 million financing round led by Earlybird Venture Capital.
Socialbakers said it will use the cash to execute ‘aggressive growth plans’ and extend its platform offering.
Jason Whitmire, General Partner at Earlybird, will join investor Martin Huml of Runway Capital, LLC on the board of directors.
Since its launch in 2009, over 250,000 brands and marketing professionals use the Socialbakers platform each month and in 2011 over 30 of the Fortune 500 chose to license the premium version of the service including Lufthansa, L’Oréal, Danone, Vodafone, Samsung, GE Money, Ogilvy, Kraft, and Peugeot.
“Socialbakers has experienced providential growth in the last year, reached profitability every quarter since our launch, hired 55 professionals and we are still growing strongly,” said Jan Rezab, CEO and co-founder, Socialbakers. “The funding from Earlybird enables us to accelerate the business growth of our software-as-a-service (SaaS) based social media platform and further strengthens our position in the most important global markets.
“Facebook today is one of the most important form of consumer engagement, source of traffic, and one of the most significant base for tangible customer conversion for brands,” said Irene Meister, Global Digital and Social Media Manager at Danone. “To date, this key channel has been difficult to manage in terms of content management, user analytics, and engagement. Socialbakers changes this and allows global brands like Danone to holistically measure and manage their Facebook presence so we can better connect with consumers on a local and global level.”
The company’s flexible dashboard Socialbakers Engagement Analytics enables statistical analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ accounts.
“Social and digital media analytics is one of the most exciting and fastest areas of growth in web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) models today,” said Jason Whitmire, General Partner at Earlybird. “The social media industry has reached an inflection point where there is a need for a highly scalable model combining social media and SaaS. We believe this investment will support Socialbakers to continue to deliver scale, performance, quality and reliability to even the largest enterprise players.”
www.socialbakers.com