Spredfast , the leading independent social relationship platform, today announced its entrance into Europe with the opening of its first office in the United Kingdom.

Among the more than 300 enterprise brands that choose Spredfast to manage their strategic social programs, many are already running social operations on a global level. Currently the company serves customers in more than 20 different countries including British Airways, Vodafone UK, and Reed Business Information – UK. Now with a U.K. hub in London, Spredfast will be able to support the increasing demand from international brands and further its global expansion efforts.

This move comes on the heels of a record funding round for Spredfast, where the company raised $32.5 million in growth capital.  In order to achieve the company’s aggressive global expansion efforts, Spredfast selected the U.K. to serve as a home base for entry into the booming European market. According to Forrester Research , social media marketing spend will reach €3.2 billion in 2017, a drastic increase from the €1.4 billion spent in 2012. The amount of social network users in Europe is also expected to rise to more than 70 percent by 2017.

Oana Neumayer, vice president of EMEA, will lead Spredfast in the U.K. In this new role, Neumayer will be responsible for overall management of Spredfast’s U.K. operations including sales and continued growth of the Spredfast community. Previously, Oana served as Managing Director of Syncapse EMEA and APAC, where she spearheaded the company’s global expansion efforts and managed strategic partnerships with multiple Fortune 500 clients.

“Spredfast experienced unprecedented growth in 2013, as did the social media market itself — changing from a mere broadcast medium to one that is much more targeted,” said Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast. “With this in mind, our company is committed to providing every brand, worldwide, with the most robust, social relationship platform on the market so they can reach their customers in a highly targeted, effective way and build lasting relationships. By opening an office in the U.K. and bringing on Oana, we are taking our first step — of many — towards global expansion.”

Through the Spredfast platform, brands are equipped with the most robust targeting options available to better reach niche audiences across major social networks, such as on Twitter where companies can directly target organic tweets by country. Spredfast’s platform also provides brands with best-in-class tools to manage, engage, listen, and measure their strategic social programs.

About Spredfast

Based in Austin, Texas, Spredfast provides a social relationship platform that empowers enterprise brands to build lasting relationships by creating great social experiences.  Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single software platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Foursquare, and popular blogging platforms. Some of the enterprise and agency adopters on board with Spredfast include AT&T, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, HomeAway, and Ogilvy. For more information, visit www.spredfast.com

Digital marketing services company Signpost is so confident that its cloud service can help small businesses with building their book of business that the CEO, Stuart Wall, said it offers a refund to company’s that don’t find at least five new qualified prospects each month. “We guarantee five [leads],” Wall said, during a recent interview to discuss his company’s growth over the past year.

New York-based Signpost is specifically focused on marketing automation for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), helping them create or optimize profiles across “dozens’ of Web site or mobile apps that people use to research products and services. As of November 2013, the service was used by approximately 10,000 SMBs across the United States. That same month, it snagged $10 million in Series B funding from a group including OpenView Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Scout Ventures and individual investor Jack Herrick. That brings the total raised by the company so far to more than $15 million.

“SMB owners know that online and mobile platforms influence most of their new and existing customers,” said Dev Ittycheria, managing director with OpenView Venture, commenting on his firm’s investment. “But these same businesses find it nearly impossible to manage dozens of complicated, confusing platforms effectively. Signpost stands out with the unique ability to empower SMBs to leverage cloud-based marketing automation technology, previously only accessible to much larger corporations.”

Signpost focuses on automating and improving three specific processes:

• Presence – The service provides a dashboard (image above) that allows SMBs to update or refine their profiles for oodles of different social networks, e-commerce marketplaces and search engines, including Google+, Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, Bing, Yelp!, eBay and Mapquest.
• Conversion – By tracking and capturing information for one of every five visitors, Signpost seeks to help SMBs convert more of their leads into paying customers.
• Remarketing (the newest feature) – The service leverages user data to create the sorts of messages for social media and email that would appeal to different demographics. A new visitor, for example, might receive a “welcome” note, while someone who has visited but hasn’t bought all that often, might receive a special incentive; “loyal” customers (as defined by the business) could receive an entirely different promotion. The company reports at the average SMB sees double-digit repeat business from Signpost-created remarketing campaigns.

You won’t find pricing information on Signpost’s Web site, but it usually involves a three-month commitment, Wall said. (I’ve seen references on the Web placing that fee at $375 per quarter, although likely it depends on the results that an SMB is attempting to drive.) Given that Signpost itself has a monthly churn of just 3 percent of its customers, it must be doing something right.

Skytap, a Seattle startup that allows companies to test development environments in the cloud, has raised an additional $6.45 million in series C financing from existing investors OpenView Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and WRF Capital. The company, led by CEO Thor Culverhouse, is growing fast.

It boosted headcount by 30 percent in 2013, and increased sales internationally.

“To fuel our momentum and drive our next phase of growth, we’ll use this capital to support the development of Skytap’s channel program, and accelerate our go-to-market strategy in response to the increasing global customer demand we’re experiencing,” Culverhouse wrote in ablog post. “We will also use the funding to continue our investment in developing a passionate team that thrives on seeing their efforts quickly answer real customer demand.”

Skytap’s online cloud environment helps developers build software faster, testing applications across operating systems, browsers and programming languages.

The company, which boasts more than 270 enterprise customers, said it plans to increase headcount again this year by 30 percent. It employs 95 people, and has raised $29.45 million to date.

Sonian, a data archiving services firm based in Dedham, eclipsed the $10 million revenue mark in 2013 and plans to launch a new cloud product in February using $8 million in recently raised venture funding.

The new funding was initially disclosed in an SEC filing in late November, and Sonian named the investors in the round on Monday — Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners, Needham-based Prism Venture Partners and Summerhill Venture Partners, which has offices in Boston and Toronto.

The funding completes Sonian’s Series C round at $21.6 million, and brings Sonian to $37.6 million in total raised since its founding in 2007.

The company’s new product, DiscoverStor, is slated to debut Feb. 4. The product will allow customers to index, store and search through nearly 500 different file types on the cloud — from emails to medical imaging and CAD (computer-aided design) drawings.

The content can be retrieved in seconds, making it far easier for businesses to find many types of data in the cloud, Sonian CEO Jeff Dickerson said in an interview.

“What we’re looking to do is take all this business content and store it on the cloud and make it searchable,” Dickerson said.

Along with passing $10 million in revenue last year, Sonian now has 14,000 customers across 40 countries, Dickerson said. Customers include IBM, Amazon.com and Rackspace.

Sonian has about 80 employees, fewer than half of which are based in Dedham. The rest are spread across the company’s offices in Denver, Seattle, San Diego and the United Kingdom, Dickerson said.

The company’s expansion goals for 2014 include growing its employee base between 25 and 30 percent to drive revenue.

“We’re looking to double the size, from a revenue standpoint, this year,” Dickerson said.

DiscoverStor’s target market is legal technology, but the company itself has customers across a wide range of industries including health care, retail, manufacturing and state and federal government.

Sonian indexes and stores about 17 million documents each day across five public clouds.

 

Socrata, a Seattle-based cloud software company focused exclusively on democratizing access to government data, today announced outstanding gains in 2013 – including 166% revenue growth, 80% customer growth and 108% employee growth – as well as significant growth projections for 2014.

“We grew in three key areas in 2013 – revenue, customers and head count. Our business is expanding rapidly and we’re excited to help our growing family of customers take their place as leaders in open data and performance measurement. I am proud of what we’ve achieved and where we’re going,” says Socrata CEO and Founder Kevin Merritt.

Triple-Digit Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth

Socrata benefited from its place at the front of the growing open data market. Its revenue grew 166% year-over-year in 2013. This is a healthy increase compared to 136% revenue growth in 2012.

Highlighting the momentum behind Socrata’s current growth, Merritt notes that 61% of the revenue increase Socrata had in 2013 came from new customer acquisitions.

80% Year-Over-Year Customer Growth

Socrata’s family of open data innovators grew by 44 in 2013, with 61% of those newer customers joining in the final two quarters of the year, a strong sign of momentum heading into 2014. This number especially stands out when compared to the 29 customers gained in 2012.

Some of Socrata’s newest customers, added in the second half of 2013, include the City of Los Angeles Office of the Controller and the City of Las Vegas, Nevada.

And, Socrata’s customer retention rate is at 99.5%, with 79% of customers upgrading or expanding to new Socrata products and offerings in 2013.

This increased use of the Socrata platform resulted in massive growth in data movement and application programming interface (API) calls in 2013; a sign of greater production of new apps and more uses for civic data.

The number of datasets accessible to citizens through the Socrata platform increased 83% year-over-year in 2013. The consumption of data on the company’s network grew 267% in 2013, including an astounding 1,065% increase in API-based usage.

108% Year-Over-Year Employee Growth

Socrata invested in its future by adding new talent to its engineering, sales, marketing, client services, finance, and product teams in 2013, for a total of a 108% increase in headcount. A round of capital raised in June of 2013 helped to make this rapid growth possible.

“I am proud of the hard-working and creative team we have built. They impress me every day by delivering the best solutions to our customers so that they can, in turn, improve the lives of the citizens they serve,” says Merritt. “Our team is passionate about the work we do.”

Additions to the leadership team in 2013 include Bill Glenn as Vice President of Marketing, Saf Rabah as Vice President of Product, former White House Innovation Fellow Ian Kalin as Director of Open Data and Ken Melero as Director of Federal Sales. New board members include OpenView Venture Partners Founder and Senior Managing Director Scott Maxwell, international technology leader Francois Steiger, and former CFO and COO of RightNow Technologies Susan Carstensen.

Customer Awards by the Dozens

Socrata’s customers earned dozens of awards for their open data and performance measurement programs in 2013. Merritt counts their achievements as the highlight of the year. Socrata’s customers pioneered new ways to make open data more mainstream, improve citizen services, boost transparency and create greater efficiencies through technology. Awards earned in 2013 include:

 

“We are thrilled to part of the growing Socrata community. So much is possible when those of us working in open data share best practices and innovate quickly to improve our service to citizens,” says Tobin Broadhurst, Chief Technology Officer for the County of Alameda in California.

New Solutions Added in 2013

Launched early in 2013, Socrata GovStatTM helps organizations publish their progress against goals in real time, both internally and publicly. Organizations like the City of Edmonton, Alberta, San Mateo County and the State of Hawaii are leading adopters of the solution. And, in its second release, GovStat added new features that allow for more flexible goal setting and tracking of metrics.

In support of international expansion, Socrata’s solutions became available on Microsoft’s global Azure platform in 2013, and are being used by the Lombardia Region of Italy to power its open data initiative.

Socrata also launched a new suite of financial transparency apps. The company is currently working with design partners like Montgomery County, Maryland and other municipalities to develop the apps further. Socrata has expanded the capabilities of its OpenCheckbookTM application, now in use by San Mateo County, the City of Boston and the City of Los Angeles Controller’s Office.

Other apps released by Socrata in 2013 included Open311, used by Kansas City, Mo., and a campaign spending app used by the State of Hawaii.

Leading the Way in Open Data Thought Leadership

In addition to new solutions that strengthen the open data movement, Socrata produced its first edition of “Open Innovation” in 2013, a magazine that features the success stories and latest trends in the global open data movement.

Continued Momentum Forecasted For 2014

Socrata forecasts continued strong momentum in the public sector for its open data and performance measurement solutions, as well as its growing number of civic apps created on Socrata’s cloud platform. For example, in early January 2014, Socrata welcomed its 100th customer, followed quickly by several more.

Socrata plans to deliver its platform, solutions and apps to local and regional governments globally, while continuing to expand into the U.S. Federal market with help from newly hired sales leadership in its Washington, D.C. office.

Socrata is working on broadening the types of apps it offers and increasing its support of the open data ecosystem. Its newly formed apps team has plans to announce multiple new apps in 2014 in the areas of financial transparency, public safety, and services designed to promote greater quality of life in communities around the world.

About Socrata

Socrata is the cloud software company focused exclusively on democratizing access to government data. It helps government leaders improve transparency, modernize citizen access to information, and bring facts into every decision, with unprecedented speed and cost savings.

Delivered as turnkey cloud services, Socrata’s data consumerization products unlock data in enterprise silos and transform it into useful information that everyone can easily access, visualize, share and reuse. Innovators like the World Bank, Medicare, Data.gov, EnergyStar, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Kenya, Lombardia, and Maryland, have all chosen Socrata as the data sharing platform for their open innovation initiatives. To learn more about Socrata, visit www.socrata.com or follow us on Twitter @socrata.

Datadog, a startup dedicated to monitoring company workloads running in Amazon Web Services and other clouds, has $15 million in fresh cash from a new Series B funding round led by OpenView Venture Partners.

That brings total funding for the New York-based company to about $22.5 million.

With its new money, Datadog plans to expand its existing infrastructure to meet demand — the company said it added more than 30,000 servers under management in the last calendar year. It also wants to better support big customers — those with more than 10,000 servers — and to staff up both its engineering staff in New York and Boston.

Datadog claims customers including Coursera, HP Cloud Services, Intel, Salesforce.com, Hearst Magazines and Zendesk.

Datadog is also adding industry veteran Dev Ittycheria, founder of BladeLogic (now part of BMC Software), to its board.

Datadog is part of a pretty crowded field attacking a fairly large opportunity. It’s true that more businesses are sending more workloads and data into their clouds of choice and want to keep better taps on performance “up there.” It’s also true that dozens of small companies want to monitor those loads — Datadog competitors include Boundary, Cloudyn, Finally.io, Server Density, and Stackdriver.

All of those smaller companies also face improving server monitoring tools from AWS and the other cloud vendors as well. They’re banking that customers will want one set of tools to look at multiple clouds.

Existing backers Index Ventures, RTP Ventures, Amplify Partners, IA Ventures, Contour Venture Partners, NYCSeed and RRE Ventures also participated in the new round.

Datadog, the SaaS-based monitoring and data analytics platform that provides a unified view of IT infrastructure today announced that it has raised $15 million in a Series B round led by OpenView Venture Partners, with follow-on investments from Index Ventures, RTP Ventures, Amplify Partners, IA Ventures and Contour Ventures. Dev Ittycheria, OpenView’s Managing Director and former Founder and CEO of BladeLogic, will join the company’s board of directors.

Datadog will use the latest financing to accelerate the development of its next-generation monitoring platform for highly scalable cloud infrastructure. The company will also be aggressively growing its engineering division and expanding its sales and marketing teams in New York and Boston to meet the increasing market demand.

“Increasingly organizations are shifting their computing workloads from static on-premise infrastructure to elastically scaling clouds,” said Ittycheria. “Easily adding and changing compute capacity is a major benefit of the cloud, but also introduces a level of dynamism that overwhelms legacy monitoring systems. Datadog has created a monitoring platform that has been explicitly designed to monitor highly elastic compute environments on public or private clouds as well as to support traditional computing infrastructure.”

Datadog achieved dramatic growth in 2013, adding hundreds of customers and bringing over 30,000 servers onto its monitoring service. The company also further positioned itself for continued strong growth in 2014 by expanding its compatibility beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS) with the release of HP Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, and OpenStack integrations.

“Datadog has made it effortless for us to collect and analyze the metrics from our cloud application’s infrastructure”, said Steve Loyd, Director of Operations, Zendesk, “As we scale, Datadog easily adapts to our infrastructure growth, frequently providing us with new insights into our platform.”

“We saw tremendous growth in 2013, and are thrilled by strong validation we are receiving from our customers and the market,” said Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO, Datadog, “As more enterprises migrate their infrastructure to public or private clouds, we will continue to make it manageable at scale for them, and allow them to effortlessly improve performance, and accelerate their release cycles. This funding will help us attract premier talent and allow us to rapidly expand Datadog’s business.”

General Availability

Datadog is available for a 14 day free trial after signing up at http://www.datadog.com. Pricing begins at $15 per monitored host per month. Hourly pricing is available for non-persistent hosts.

About Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring service that brings together data from servers, databases, applications, tools and services to present a unified view of the infrastructure. These capabilities are provided on a SaaS-based data analytics platform that enables Dev and Ops teams to work collaboratively on the infrastructure to avoid downtime, resolve performance problems and ensure that development and deployment cycles finish on time.

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion-stage venture capital fund based in Boston that is focused on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies quickly optimize their product, go-to-market, and organizational and operational functions. Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has approximately $440 million in total capital under management.

AtTask (attask.com), an industry leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise work management solutions, announced today that it has closed on a growth round of capital, raising a total of $38 million.

This financing round will help accelerate AtTask’s acquisition of market share and product innovation to deliver more targeted work management solutions for enterprise work teams. The Series D round was led by JMI Equity, a growth equity firm focused on investing in leading software and technology-enabled services companies.

“Following record growth in 2013, driven by accelerated adoption by larger enterprise clients, this Series D funding will enable us to expedite our future growth initiatives,” said Eric Morgan, AtTask CEO. “We are extremely pleased to have JMI Equity on our team. With its successful track record of building world-class SaaS organizations, JMI will help us capitalize on our market opportunity while expanding our offerings and support for these enterprise clients.”

“We believe that, based on its track record, AtTask is well positioned to continue to solve the challenges that plague enterprise teams today with its Enterprise Work Management solution,” said Peter Arrowsmith, General Partner at JMI Equity, who will join the AtTask board of directors.  “Our investment in AtTask draws parallels to our experience at Eloqua and ServiceNow where we invested at key points in each company’s growth and helped fuel their expansion. We’re looking forward to working with Eric and his team to continue AtTask’s growth trajectory.”

Existing AtTask investors, GreenSpring Associates, Escalate Capital and University Venture Fund, also participated in this round of capital.

About AtTask

AtTask is a cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solution that helps marketing, IT, and other enterprise teams conquer the chaos of excessive email, redundant status meetings, and disconnected tools. Unlike other tools, AtTask Enterprise Work Cloud is a centralized, easy-to-adopt solution for managing and collaborating on all types of work through the entire work lifecycle, which improves team productivity and executive visibility. AtTask is trusted by thousands of global enterprises, like Adobe, Cisco, HBO, Kellogg’s, House of Blues, REI, Trek, Schneider Electric, Tommy Hilfiger, Disney, and ATB Financial. To learn more, visit www.AtTask.com or follow us on Twitter @AtTask.

About JMI Equity

JMI Equity is a growth equity firm focused on investing in leading software and technology-enabled services companies.  Founded in 1992, JMI has invested in more than 110 businesses in its target markets and has over $2.1 billion of committed capital under management.  JMI provides capital for growth, recapitalizations, acquisitions and buyouts.  Representative investments include DoubleClick, Eloqua, Halogen, PointClickCare and  ServiceNow.  For more information on JMI Equity, visit www.jmi.com.