Thismoment, a company that helps businesses collect user-generated content for their own marketing efforts, is announcing that it has raised $17.6 million in Series D funding.
The company says it can automatically gather content (usually photos and videos) from across social platforms when it’s been posted with a given hashtag. It asks users for the rights to republish those photos and videos, and it allows customers to create “playlists” that mix their own content with what they’ve gathered from users.
That content can then be used in marketing campaigns, shared on social media, incorporated into e-commerce products, and more. (The platform integrates with other marketing tools like Adobe Marketing Cloud, Salesforce1, and Sprinklr.)
Thismoment also says it works with more than 150 brands, including Coca-Cola, Intuit, Levi’s, Sephora, Fleishman Hillard, and Digitas. It’s been a little over two years since the company raised its $22 million Series C, and since then I’ve written about a number of other startups that include UGC collection and permissions as part of their product — for example Chute and Percolate.
When I asked Thismoment founder and CEO Vince Broady about the competition, he argued that his product offers a broad platform for big companies, rather than specific tools for a limited number of use cases, like sharing on social media.
“If you imagine three years in the future, everyone’s going to have, I believe, a platform to ingest and clear rights and organize and distribute user generated content on their overall marketing architecture,” Broady said. “Specifically on an enterprise level, you don’t have to limit yourself … to a specific use case as the ultimate goal.”
At the same time, Broady said Thismoment will be adding more features for specific industries, as well as expanding internationally, introducing more content sources, and adding more places where the user-generated content can be republished and distributed.
The new funding was led by Sierra Ventures, Trident Capital (Sierra and Trident both participated in the Series C), and UMC Capital.
Update: I also asked the company about how the current valuation compared with that of the Series C, but it declined to comment.