newBrandAnalytics, a company that provides business intelligence from social media customer feedback, has raised $26 million in Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates with Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures, Jeff Webber’s The Entrepreneur’s Fund, Barry Sternlicht (Founder, Starwood Hotels), Neil Shah, Quest Hospitality Ventures, and Ted Leonsis participating.
newBrandAnalytics, which has been in stealth for the past two years, provides a monitoring and analysis product that mines customer reviews from social sites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Trip Advisor. But instead of just serving as a monitoring product, the startup actually analyzes all of this data and will make intelligent, operational recommendations to businesses based on customer feedback.
Currently, the newBrandAnalytics social intelligence products are being used by thousands of hotels, restaurants, retailers, and leisure companies worldwide. The company’s flagship product, called Social Guest Satisfaction, harvests credible customer feedback and then uses patent-pending algorithms to interpret, qualify, and categorizes each customer mention. The company has built a number of social algorithms to determine how company makes operational decisions around this social feedback, as opposed to delivering marketing advice.
newBrandAnalytics was founded by Neil Kataria, Kam Desai and Ashish Gambhir. Prior to this, the team actually founded e-commerce company Riva Commerce, which was acquired by Oracle.
Currently, PF Changs, Applebee’s, San Francisco restaurant Michael Mina, The SLS Hotel Group and New York City Burger empire Shake Shack are all using NewBrandAnalytics’ offering. The beauty of the product is that it works for both small businesses and enterprise customers, says Kataria.
The new funding will be used to accelerate customer acquisition and towards building a scalable sales model.