Austin—Social media marketing software company Spredfast has raised $50 million, bringing its total funding raised to $116 million.
Riverwood Capital, a private equity firm based in Menlo Park, CA, led the round. Also participating were return backers Austin Ventures, Interwest Partners, OpenView Venture Partners, and Lead Edge Capital.
“Social media is super dynamic in the product innovation market,” Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron tells Xconomy. “We’ll continue to innovate our product, deeper and wider.”
He says the company will also use the money to further expand globally, especially by beefing up its offices in Europe and Asia. Spredfast now employs more than 500 people across five international offices, and has more than 650 customers, including Target, Bank of America, ITV, Airbnb, and NBC Universal.
The company last raised $33 million two years ago. Since that time, Spredfast has acquired smaller competitors such as Wisconsin-based Shoutlet and hometown rival Mass Relevance.
What Spredfast specializes in, Favaron says, is “one-to-one social care marketing.”
“We did some research this spring and the top brands we looked at much of the [marketing] content was one-to-one, instead of one-to-many,” he says. “We’re seeing the amplification of using social as a conversational channel. That’s helped us form our product roadmap and strategy.”
As social media has evolved to encompass high-bandwidth video, more technical resources are needed to support all the exchanges happening around the world, Favaron says. Retailers can have more dynamic conversations with their customers by using social media, he says.
“You can take an Instagram post and share it on your website,” he says. “You link that content to your e-commerce page and drive traffic.”
As venture capital continues to pour into Spredfast, going public increasingly seems like an option, though Favaron is mostly keeping mum.
“It’s entirely possible that we take the company public, though we’re not prepared to talk about it,” he says. “But I think the market will support that.”
Still, he added that there are advantages to staying small enough to adapt to a fast-changing set of technologies. “This market won’t be won by a big player long term,” Favaron says. “The winner will focused and nimble.”
