April saw another month of fundraising across the industry. Memo announced its funding round as did Mavrck and BlueOcean. Meanwhile, Babel Street picked up a $USD 27 million contract and Corint Media sued Microsoft over its use of press content.
Memo raises $USD 10 million
Memo, the readership data tool, has raised $USD 10 million in its Series A funding round, with a $USD 60 million valuation. The company intends to us the funding to invest in all areas of its business, focusing especially on product and engineering. The objective is to continue to expand the data available on Memo’s platform. The company also intends to ramp up its partnerships with publishers. (In case you missed it, We shared the pitch deck last month.)
Mavrck raises $USD 135 million, makes acquisition
Content creators/influencers, with their engaged audiences and global reach, are an increasingly effective channel for comms pros to reach their target audiences. Mavrck, the influencer management platform provider, has picked up $USD 135 million in its latest funding round. The company took the extra funds and acquired Later, the Canadian social media scheduling and Linkin.bio service.
BlueOcean picks up $USD 30 million
BlueOcean, the AI-powered brand decision platform, raised a $UDS 30 million in Series B funding. BlueOcean has experienced immense growth over the past year, the team grew from 11 to 100 employees in 12 months. This news also follows the launch of Brand Navigator, a platform that analyses the owned, paid and earned media results of 6,000+ brands to inform its clients with always-on answers about brand health and competitive positioning.
Babel Street and the $USD 27 million contract
Anomaly Six’s pitch to Zignal Labs
Speaking of Babel Street and publicly available information, Anomaly Six (or “A6”) has pitched its mobile phone location-tracking technology to Zignal Labs, the social media listening provider. A6 was co-founded by a couple of Babel Street alumni. According to reports, the A6 presentation claimed that the company can track roughly 3 billion mobile devices in real time, and uses GPS to define precise location. The company was wanting to blend its location data with Zignal Labs’s Twitter firehose in order to add highly accurate location data to social media conversations. The users of the data would be government and defence. Reporting of this story has focused on data privacy, which is not a new theme but one that all social media listening providers need to be mindful of.
Corint Media sues Microsoft for €20 million
UNESCO’s World Book and Copyright Day was celebrated on April 23. (I hope that you remembered to mark the day appropriately.) The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ / EFJ) leveraged the day to warn against the business models of Meta and Google, which they felt were “wreaking havoc on the financial foundations of independent news reporting”. Earlier in the month, licensing body Corint Media commenced legal action against Microsoft over its press content use. Corint Media took the step after two years of talks with Microsoft about its use of press content by MSN and Microsoft Bing. Microsoft had offered €700,000 for its use of press content.
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