San Diego Social Media Startup Soci Adds Austin Office, Raises $8.5M

SOCi logo

Soci, a San Diego startup that created a Web platform for managing social media, has closed on $8.5 million in Series A financing that will be used to build on the company’s recent growth, including a second office in Austin, TX, according to co-founder and CEO Afif Khoury.

The five-year-old startup, which had 35 employees five months ago when it was named as a 2017 Xconomy San Diego company to watch, now has 50 employees.

Soci’s software-as-a-service provides a “central command” that enables business customers to deploy their social media marketing strategies, customize their brand messaging, and control their customer conversations across thousands of social media pages. Soci said it is fully integrated with the top social media and reputation management networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Yelp, and others.

In response to questions from Xconomy, Khoury said Soci already has recruited a new chief revenue officer, vice president of marketing, and vice president of inside sales in Austin.

“Austin is rich in enterprise sales and marketing talent, as well as digital marketing expertise,” Khoury wrote in an e-mail.  “We will maintain development, customer success, and part of marketing in San Diego, as well as all of the ancillary functions like HR, finance, etc. The rest of sales and marketing will headquarter from Austin.”

Khoury told me in the fall that Soci had increased its revenue by more than 300 percent last year, which was its second year of commercialization. Soci’s dramatic growth has continued since then, Khoury said. He plans to use Soci’s latest funding to deploy additional capital into new marketing initiatives, address new vertical markets, and hire additional sales reps and managers, develop new software products and services for Soci’s existing markets, and expand the team that works with customers and improve its processes.

Soci team (image courtesy of Soci)

According to a statement, Soci’s Series A round was led by two venture firms, Vertical Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley-based technology fund, and Grayhawk Capital, an Arizona technology fund. They were joined by the Stanford University DAPER fund, Peninsula Ventures, and Tallwave Capital.

Soci previously raised $4.25 million from local angel investors and Silicon Valley Growth Syndicate, GrowthX, and Axon Ventures.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.