33Across Grabs $13.1 Million in Funding

Social data company 33Across has notched $13.1 million in its latest funding round, bringing the total funding raised to more than $26 million, said CEO Eric Wheeler. New investor Pelion Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors First Round Capital, Flybridge Venture Capital, Greycroft Partners and Panorama Capital. Wheeler said those dollars will go toward scaling infrastructure, building out the product suite and expanding the company’s employee base, specifically in engineering, product and sales. “This is a true growth round,” he said, adding that the company’s grown its revenue by 468 percent from 2008 until last year and has since tripled that undisclosed number. In terms of infrastructure, Wheeler said the priorities are to decrease the latency and increase the accuracy in 33Across’s ability to process and score social data in real time. With that in hand, the company will dial up the way it can take that data and create audience segments for clients, what 33Across refers to as the Brand Graph, to target users across the web. “We’ve only just scratched the surface with the Brand Graph and how to bring data, insights and targeting and segmentation to life for the biggest brands we work with,” he said. “There are some products we’ll be bringing to market in the coming months that are truly, truly differentiated. There’s a lot of me-too speak going on in the marketplace.” 33Across acquired publishing sharing tool Tynt earlier this year and has fully integrated it into the company’s platform. Wheeler said because of that deal, 33Across now sees 1.25 billion cookies every month. “From a competition standpoint, there are few people who have access to the kind of data and scale that we do,” he said. AddThis and ShareThis are two of 33Across’s competitors, Wheeler said, with the former similar in size to 33Across but with a lot more money raised and the latter on the smaller side. Although Wheeler’s sights are set even higher. “Ultimately we’re at a level where we’re making decisions at a vp of marketing/CMO-level decisions with these brands. So we’re more up there with Facebook, Twitter and Google in terms of the size and the scale of the value we can provide,” he said. 33Across sits in an uber-popular ecosystem, and companies like Salesforce and Oracle have taken notice of social data’s value for their customers, buying up companies like Radian6 and Collective Intellect respectively. But just because social data companies are hot acquisition targets right now doesn’t mean Wheeler’s looking for an out—or at least he's not saying that he is. “We just raised capital. We are executing on a massive product and technology roadmap. We’re going to continue to grow; we’re a very fast growing, high revenue, high growth business. And that’s what we’re focused on today. I’m not at all focused on selling the company,” he said. “It’s just getting fun.”

Performance Marketing

33Across Grabs $13.1 Million in Funding

Social data firm has eyes on Facebook, Google, not selling

Tim Peterson

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Tim Peterson