Klout Bags $8.5M Funds for Business Expansion
Leading social media analytics expert Klout has raised an estimated $8.5 million in additional funds. Klout has seamlessly secured funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer (KPCB) sFund and participation from Greycroft Partners.
A thrilled Joe Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Klout, relates how they will utilize the investments. He said, “It’s been amazing seeing the passion the social media community has for their Klout Scores. We have a lot of work ahead of us, though. We intend to invest heavily in increasing the performance of our system to deliver the accuracy, clarity and actionability commensurate with being the standard for influence. To do so, we will need to greatly expand the number of services that are analyzed in calculating the Klout Score and provide a much richer consumer experience.”
The fund was further augmented and summed up to over $10 million as others expressed their confidence in Klout’s business. The group includes prominent angel investors, including Paige Craig, Howard Lindzon, Thomas McInerney and Bobby Yazdani.
The San Francisco-based company measures a user’s influence across their social network. Klout comes up with analysis via impact of their opinions, links, recommendations and other online content. For Twitter, Klout gauges influence through following count, follower count, retweets, list memberships, how many spam or dead accounts are following you, how prominent the people that retweet you are, and unique mentions. For the bigger Facebook, Klout utilizes comment, likes, and the number of friends in a user’s network to come up with a “Klout Score”.
KPCB has been extensively involved in backing up businesses like AOL, Amazon.com, Citrix, Compaq Computer, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Genomic Health, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign, and Xilinx.
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