Lithium Technologies, an online enterprise communities solutions provider, has raised a $12 million in a Series B equity round led by Benchmark Capital. Lithium had previously raised $9 million in a Series A in April 2007, which was co-led by Shasta Ventures and Emergence Capital.
Lithium provides on-demand solutions for enterprise communities, providing social networks, forums, live chat, instant messaging and other social tools. They also provide API’s and an analytics solution all on-demand through their platform. Lithium-built communities are being used by 10.6 million average users per day across all their customers, and they have on average 2.2 billion messages sent per month. Some Lithium clients include PayPal, Dell, Symantec, AT&T, Playstation, and Barnes & Noble.
Lithium says that they will be using this funding to expand their social media service offerings and a more agressive business development approach (ie. the ‘bring in the sales guys’ phase). Lithium has a solid approach and track record, and is an easy route for building an insta-community around a brand or website. It is a space that is getting more and more competitive with a number of both self-install and hosted options available.