A pair of New York big data companies separately announced funding news this morning. Dataminr, a three-year-old real-time social media analytics company, said it raised $13 million in a Series B round with GSV Capital, Deep Fork Capital, Viceroy Capital, Wharton Equity Partners, and others. Founded in 2009, Dataminr uses its access to Twitter’s firehose of public tweets to help identify trends and analyze events happening around the world for its clients in the financial and government sectors.
Dataminr CEO Ted Bailey tells Xconomy his company’s event detection engine identifies hotspots of activity across Twitter. “It figures out which of those hotspots are related to an individual user’s portfolio, trading strategies, and macro topics of interest,” he says. That information is fed to a Web-based application along with contextual data to help users understand the importance of these updates.
Bailey says Dataminr’s platform helps financial professionals discover relevant information amidst noisy, hard-to-use data sets. “There’s a growing realization across the financial industry—on the buy side and the sell side—that there is a lot of value in Twitter yet there really hasn’t been a tool to access that value,” he says.
Thus far Dataminr has raised $16.5 million in total and the company said its latest funding will go towards technology development and customer acquisition.
Meanwhile eXelate today said it raised $12 million in a Series C round led by NewSpring Capital with participation from Carmel Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Trident Capital. EXelate, founded in 2007, gathers data for advertisers and marketers regarding online purchase intent, household demographics, and behavioral patterns of consumers.
CEO Mark Zagorski told Xconomy eXelate helps advertisers use big data from online and offline sources to better understand and target their audiences. “We built a data marketplace that accumulates information on 400 million unique [consumers] worldwide,” he says.
Leveraging big data, Zagorski says, can give marketers more perspective on the majority of their customers rather than the smaller samples reached through surveys and market research. The digital advertising sector continues to evolve, he says, as devices such as tablets, smartphones, and interactive television pull attention away from computers, the traditional platform for Web-based ads. “Not only is data being capture on those [devices], advertising is being served in those venues,” Zagorski says. “The idea of creating a seamless messaging world [for digital advertising] is where the business heading.”
According to Zagorski, eXelate plans to use its latest funding to explore possible acquisitions and partnerships, invest in its data science team, develop its mobile and analytics products, and to expand its geographic presence. In addition to New York, eXelate currently has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. To date the company has raised $32 million in funding.
