DataSift, the leading social data platform company, announced today that it has received $15 million in Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners; Rory O'Driscoll, Managing Director with ScaleVP joins the board. Additional participants in the round include current investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures, along with new investors Northgate Capital and Daher Capital. The funding round comes at a time when DataSift's growth is accelerating across a wide variety of customer groups and geographies.

Based on a recent Gartner report1, social content, defined as corporate blogs, communication and collaboration platforms, coupled with external platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, is the fastest growing category of new content in the enterprise. In order to garner significant value from this wealth of data and gain a competitive edge, businesses must draw insight from both private and public sources to inform strategy. The true potential and future of Big Data is the union of public data and private enterprise data, and DataSift is the only company poised to deliver on that promise with its powerful platform that has expanded significantly since its launch in 2011.

"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, DataSift. "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."

DataSift has emerged as not only the leading social data platform, but also as one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley. The company 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. With this new round of funding from Scale Venture Partners, DataSift is on the fast track to market leadership.

"Rory O'Driscoll and the ScaleVP team blew us away with their deep understanding of SaaS, PaaS and the emerging use of social in the enterprise," said Rob Bailey, CEO, DataSift. "ScaleVP has added value for us at every turn with their insightful counsel and enthusiasm, and we're confident that they will be a key player in building the company for the next stage of our growth."

The growing excitement in the social data space sparked an enormous amount of investor interest in DataSift, and because of this, the company was able to proactively select Scale Venture Partners, a firm ideally suited to successfully navigate the company's next phase of growth. DataSift will benefit from ScaleVP's deep experience in the field, including previous investments in companies such as Box, Vitrue, ExactTarget, and HubSpot.

"DataSift is at the intersection of two huge trends: social and Big Data. The company has built a real time data platform that allows customers to sift through billions of tweets, posts and internal corporate data to find just the insight they need for their business, while the easy to use query tool means anyone can access the data directly," said Rory O'Driscoll Managing Director Scale Venture Partners. "Great companies make hard problems simple for the end user, and DataSift has done that with its game-changing visual interface. This is truly an exciting addition to the ScaleVP portfolio."

1 Gartner, Inc., Hype Cycle for Big Data, 2012, Anne Lapkin, July 31, 2012. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About DataSift
DataSift Inc. is the leading social data platform, enabling companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. DataSift provides access to both real-time and historical social data to uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. DataSift has offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Reading, U.K. For more information, visit www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.

About Scale Venture Partners
Scale Venture Partners (ScaleVP) invests in high-growth technology companies with a focus on SaaS, Cloud, Mobile and Internet sectors. With a proven track record and market-specific expertise, ScaleVP is a strategic partner in helping entrepreneurs and management teams scale their business and grow into long-term companies that matter. Founded in 2000, the firm has $900 million under management and is currently investing Scale Venture Partners III. Representative investments include: Box, BrightRoll, DocuSign, Everyday Health, ExactTarget (ET), HubSpot, NComputing, Omniture, RingCentral and Vitrue.