Social infrastructure company Gigya Inc. has raised $15.3 million from Israel's Benchmark Capital and US funds Mayfield Fund, DAG Ventures, as well as Advance Publications Inc., and Adobe.
Gigya provides websites and apps with complete social infrastructure that "creates immersive social experiences for users" and provides customer insights for businesses. The company says that it works with 40% comScore top 100 media in the US, and it is expanding to media in Europe.
Gigya will use the funding to expand its social infrastructure products to help businesses monetize social engagement, referral traffic and permission-based social data.
Gigya is based in San Francisco and has offices in Tel Aviv and London. It has 130 employees.
Gigya Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen, CTO Eran Kutner, and president Rooly Eliezerov, who all previously worked at Hotbar, founded the company in 2006. The company was named as one of "Globes" top ten most promising start ups for 2009.
In February, Gigya said that it exceeded 500 customers and that its technology was reaching more than one billion unique users per month. Last year, it launched three new products - Social Identity Management, Social Gamification, and Ratings & Reviews - which have been adopted by lighthouse brand, publisher and ecommerce clients. 2011 sales were more than triple sales in 2010, and the average new deal size nearly doubled.
Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer said, "Having these stakeholders invest in Gigya is a tremendous show of confidence in our business. I believe this speaks to our revenue performance and near ubiquity on the web. This new round of funding will allow us to meet the demand for our technology and help us expand our product offerings."
Advance Publications publishes more than 125 publications and digital editions worldwide through Condé Nast Magazines, Conde Nast International, American City Business Journals, Advance Newspapers, and others. VP strategy and corporate development Andrew Siegel said, “Gigya is an ideal investment for Advance Publications. Social infrastructure has become a requirement for online businesses and Gigya’s approach of offering everything a site needs to be social has been validated by its continued customer growth."
Mayfield Fund managing director Navin Chaddha said, “Facebook’s dominance has firmly established social as the language of the web, and with Gigya, businesses can now interact with their customers in the same rich and personal way. By offering complete, SaaS-based social infrastructure, Gigya has gained mass adoption and its business has exploded."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 12, 2012
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2012