Buddy Media is planning to further expand its presence in Europe after raising $54 million from investors.
The Series D funding round was led by GGV Capital. Also taking part were Institutional Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Insight Venture Partners, a new investor.
“We believe this financing is very powerful market validation of our strategy and team, sustained revenue growth, and large, growing market opportunity,” Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow said in a company statement. “The investors who competed to invest in Buddy Media are not just any investors. They are real business builders.”
The money will be used to increase expansion in Europe and to “double” the number of employees, AllThingsD reported.
Buddy Media had 40 employees in 2009 and now has close to 200 employees, Mashable reported Buddy Media is valued at $500 million, Mashable added.
The latest funding comes a $28 million funding round which was made public last October. That funding was in two parts. The first was for $23 million and was led by Institutional Venture Partners. Also taking part were Greycroft Partners, Bay Partners and Softbank Capital, each of which were existing partners. A second part was $5 million from WPP.
Buddy Media added almost 200 customers this year and doubled its revenue since the end of last year, Mashable said. Buddy Media provides products and services to help enterprises with advertising and marketing in social media, TechZone360 said.
Last year, Forrester Research predicted that spending on social media will total about $3.1 billion by 2014, TechZone360 added.
Buddy Media’s Facebook management system is used by eight of 10 of the world’s top brands, the company said.
“We are in the midst of a massive shift online from a search and intent-based world to a social, people-based world,” Lazerow said in a press release. “The last three years were about the consumer side of social platforms, as we watched Facebook, Zynga and Twitter grow exponentially. The next three years will about the enterprise side of social, and how companies engage and grow their businesses by tapping into these massive platforms. Buddy Media plans to help accelerate this movement by providing our clients easy-to-use and powerful tools to help them tap into these social platforms to increase revenues, find new customers, and build deeper relationships with current customers and more.”
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Ed Silverstein is a TechZone360 contributor. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
