New York based social media management platform Sprinklr just announced that it had received $40 million in funding, and it will now also offer a paid ads solution for social media marketers.
The company announced an updated version of its platform which will give its users the ability to not just deliver and manage content to all their social networks, they can now deploy and measure paid ad campaigns as well.
“The social age demands that brands manage experiences across every touchpoint – every team,
department, division and location,” said Ragy Thomas, CEO of Sprinklr. “Paid media is at the core and is the most expensive part of creating brand experiences”
The move puts Sprinklr directly in competition with Hootsuite, which might not have its own paid ad offering, but does allow integration with other platforms. It’s also competing with Radian6, the other big enterprise social media management tool, and Oracle’s Social Cloud, which much like Hootsuite, has also adopted a partnership approach to offering more paid ad services.
This makes Sprinklr an extremely formidable player in the social marketing world. It already had a management platform that Forrester called “the most powerful [social relationship] technology in the market,” and it added to its arsenal with its acquisition of social media analytics platform Dachis Group in February. Put that together with its paid ads offering, and you’ve got comprehensive all-in-one social media platform that is already being used by some of the worlds biggest enterprises, such as Microsoft and Dell.
That kind of ability is being vindicated by a $40 million funding round, led by the San Francisco based Iconiq Capital, which represents the investments of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech heavyweights. Other investors included Battery Ventures and Intel Capital.
“Very few companies have ever been on Sprinklr’s current trajectory,” said Neeraj Agrawal of Battery
Ventures. “The introduction of an integrated paid media module ahead of schedule positions Sprinklr as the
go to provider to replace existing point solutions in social for large businesses tired of playing the role of a
system
