Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures. The startup previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding from most of the same backers — Battery is the only addition.
Mass Relevance pulls content from Twitter and other social networks (it announced a tweet syndication deal with Twitter last year), filters the updates according to a customer’s needs, then creates visualizations that can be embedded on a website or displayed on pretty much any screen, including TVs, billboards, and in-store signs. Founder and CEO Sam Decker says that the company started out doing custom work for each customer, but it has “productized” that work into standard visualizations showing trends, conversations, maps, polls, Q&As, and more.
The company says its clients have included the Big Four television networks, seven of the top 10 cable networks, Target, Cisco, Ford, Pepsi, and Victoria’s Secret. Mass Relevance first caught on with media companies who wanted to pull content from Twitter, Decker says, but brands and advertising agencies are getting interested too. That interest can provide monetization opportunities for publishers (say if a brand wants to sponsor Mass Relevance content on a publisher’s site), but it also a reflects growing brand interest in running social network content on their own properties — for example, the company is helping Pepsi display tweets related to its “Live For Now” campaign.
Decker says one of the main goals for the funding is to “lean in to the demand we’ve experienced from brands and agencies” by building more products designed for their needs. He plans to continue growing the company in Austin, while also hiring a few people in other cities, especially New York.
