Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting

Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting

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February 17, 2011

Vitrue Set for Global Expansion with $17 Million Series C Round Funding



Social media management company Vitrue announced it has closed a $17 million Series C funding led by Scale Venture Partners and Advent Venture Partners.

Existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Comcast (News - Alert) Interactive and Dace Ventures will continue to participate in the series. After the Series C level funding, Stacey Curry Bishop, partner of Scale Venture Partners, has joined the board of Vitrue.

Vitrue plans to expand its operations utilizing the funds. Vitrue will open offices in seven markets including New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati and Los Angeles. Three international offices will be opened in London, Toronto and Singapore.

The company will have strategic product integration with best-of-breed social media application partners. It will hire between 100 and 150 new employees to support these endeavors, company officials said.

“With the explosion of Facebook (News - Alert), Twitter and mobile location-aware applications, the opportunity for brands to effectively engage and deepen relationships with consumers has never been greater,” said Reggie Bradford, CEO of Vitrue, in a statement. “We will aggressively scale the company and continue delivering best in class solutions to our customers, enabling them to connect with consumers any time, any place.”

Scale Venture Partners has already funded SaaS-based businesses, including Omniture and Exact Target (News - Alert).

“Marketing in social media has become a compelling way for businesses to engage consumers, and is a growing line in brands' budgets,” said Stacey Curry Bishop, partner with Scale Venture Partners. “Just as brands are investing here, ScaleVP wanted to catch this trend. We believe that Vitrue's experienced management team and impressive performance to date positions them to scale globally on Facebook and beyond.”

Vitrue’s software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) platform is designed to enable marketing agencies and brands to interact with 450 million people in 47 countries across more than 2,500 Facebook and Twitter accounts, emerging social media websites and mobile applications.

In July last year, Virtue announced the launch of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Management) Platform. A special feature of the platform was Vitrue Publisher 2.0, which fully supports Facebook's "Open Graph" publishing allowing marketers to create individual and segmented messages that instantly post and broadcast to every brand connection across the Web with a single click, company officials said.


Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Janice McDuffee
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