Quantifind Raises $12M To Translate Social Media Data Into Sales

Quantifind, a marketing analytics startup led by former physicists, is announcing that it has raised $12 million.

The company describes this as a strategic funding round, led by Comcast Ventures and Iris Capital. Existing investors AME Cloud Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners also participated in the new funding.

Quantifind was apparently operating under-the-radar for several years before starting to talk to the press in May. I spoke to Ari Tuchman (CEO, and a former DARPA technical lead with a Ph.D. in atomic physics from Yale) and John Stockton (head of product, with a Ph.D. in atomic physics from Caltech) around that time, and they both emphasized that Quantifind isn’t just another social listening service.

For movie studios, Tuchman said that with all the social listening tools available, there’s nothing that “actually helps sell movie tickets.” What Quantifind has built are “correlation models” that go beyond simply the amount of buzz or the sentiment on social media to find the conversations that actually influence or predict sales. For example, he suggested that even if lots of people are tweeting about how “Emma Watson is hot,” that doesn’t mean any of them are going to see her movie Noah, but if they’re tweeting about babysitters or having a girls’ night out, then there’s actually some correlation.

That data isn’t just useful for targeting social media campaigns, but for shaping traditional ads as well, Tuchman said — say if a studio discovered that a movie was resonating with a different audience than they had anticipated.

Quantifind has now raised a total of $23 million, and says its customers now include (in addition to movie studios) companies in the retail, consumer packaged goods, and telecom industries.