Earlybird Venture capital invests $2M in social analytics company Socialbakers

Socialbakers, the fastest growing social and digital media analytics company, today announced a $2 million financing round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, one of Europe’s most successful technology investors. The funding will enable already profitable Socialbakers to execute on aggressive growth plans and extend its platform offering as it solidifies its position as a global player in the expanding market for social media monitoring.  Jason Whitmire, General Partner at Earlybird, will join investor Martin Huml of Runway Capital, LLC on the board of directors.

"Social and digital media analytics is one of the most exciting and fastest areas of growth in web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) models today,” said Jason Whitmire, General Partner at Earlybird. "The social media industry has reached an inflection point where there is a need for a highly scalable model combining social media and SaaS. We believe this investment will support Socialbakers to continue to deliver scale, performance, quality and reliability to even the largest enterprise players.”

Since the launch of Socialbakers.com in 2009, over 250,000 brands and marketing professionals already engage with the Socialbakers platform each month and in 2011 over 30 of the Fortune 500 chose to license the premium version of theservice including Lufthansa, L’Oréal, Danone, Vodafone, Samsung, GE Money, Ogilvy, Kraft, and Peugeot.  Socialbakers provides global brands with solutions to build, measure, and manage their social media presence, monitor competition, and develop best practice industry benchmarks as part of Socialbakers’ Engagement Analytics and Engagement Builder products.

“Socialbakers has experienced providential growth in the last year, reached profitabilityevery quarter since our launch, hired 55 professionals and we are still growing strongly,” said Jan Rezab, CEO and co-founder, Socialbakers. “The funding from Earlybird enables us to accelerate the business growth of our software-as-a-service (SaaS) based social media platform and further strengthens our position in the most important global markets.

“Facebook today is one of the most important form of consumer engagement, source of traffic, and one of the most significant base for tangible customer conversion for brands,” said Irene Meister, Global Digital and Social Media Manager at Danone. “To date, this key channel has been difficult to manage in terms of content management, user analytics, and engagement. Socialbakers changes this and allows global brands like Danone to holistically measure and manage their Facebook presence so we can better connect with consumers on a local and global level."

The company’s flexible dashboard Socialbakers Engagement Analytics enables complex statistical analysis of Facebook in all countries globally, Facebook pages, and places, Facebook applications, developers on the Facebook platform, as well as Facebook advertising prices, with results appearing in real-time. Socialbakers Engagement Builder includes benchmarking, competitive reporting, streamlined reporting and integrated workflow capabilities to give users the ability totrack and measure dozens of social media metrics.  Additionally Socialbakers also measures LinkedIn statistics globally, Twitter user accounts, and Google+ accounts.

The new investment comes on the heels of strong growth and expansion for Socialbakers, including the following milestones:

• 15,000 small-to-medium companies and enterprises on its portal, growing at 30 companies a day.
• Adding 35 new Fortune 500 customers in the first nine months of 2011, including Lufthansa, L’Oréal, Danone, Vodafone, Samsung, GE Money, Ogilvy, Kraft, and Peugeot.
• Doubling of the company’s revenue since the end of 2010.
• Employee headcount has grown from 10 employees in 2009 to 55 with continued massive hiring plans for 2011 and beyond.
• Opening of its US Headquarters in San Francisco in August and hiring of key executive positions.
• Winning the Red Herring 100 Europe 2011 Award