Social Startup Sprinklr Raises $40 Million

Sprinklr, a social media analytics and management startup for enterprise companies, announced on Tuesday it raised a $40 million Series D round of venture financing.

The round, which was led by Iconiq Capital with participation from Battery Ventures and Intel Capital, will be used to continue Sprinklr’s growth of headcount and infrastructure over 2014.

Sprinklr offers a dashboard and set of tools for corporations to manage their social media activities across a number of services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. So for example, a brand can schedule regular tweets, monitor their customer base’s response to those tweets, and respond in kind.

It’s a crowded space. Spredfast (which just raised a large round as well), SocialFlow and Lithium carry out similar tasks. And the competition in social management software has only intensified in recent months, as companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn build out their partnerships teams to better connect brands with the startups that specialize in the space.

But Sprinklr CEO Ragy Thomas said that Sprinklr has expanded into different categories over the past two years, making his company’s offering more robust than his competition. The company launched a paid social media product on Tuesday morning, which lets brands use Sprinklr’s dashboard to schedule their paid social ads alongside their regular tweets and shares. (Though again, this isn’t unique to Sprinklr — Buddy Media launched this sort of thing back in 2012.)

He has also played up the role of Sprinklr’s connections to many social companies outside of the usual Facebook and Twitter connections.

“The true power of Sprinklr is that we support many different channels — about twenty, including international channels,” Thomas said in an interview. “So if you’re in China, for instance, Renren is just as important to you as Facebook is in the United States.”

Thomas wouldn’t disclose specifics on revenue and valuation but said that most of the company’s focus has been on growing its revenue; Sprinklr now sells its services to about 450 enterprise customers, including Microsoft, Virgin America and a number of financial institutions.

The New York-based company, which is home to about 300 employees, is considering aiming for an initial public offering in the first half of 2015, according to CEO Thomas.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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