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player ready...Geofeedia, a Chicago-based platform that helps agencies and organizations gather social media intelligence, announced Wednesday it has raised $3.5 million from institutional and angel investors. The Series A round brings the company’s total funding to just under $4 million, said CEO Phil Harris.
Geofeedia customers use the software-as-a-service platform to monitor social media posts tied to a specific location. The company uses its direct relationships, third-party vendors and social media platforms’ application program interfaces (APIs) to draw in public geo-tagged posts and related data from major social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Youtube, Picasa and Viddy.
Geofeedia also presented to venture capitalists and businesspeople from across the country at the inaugural Chicago Venture Summit on Wednesday morning.
Hyde Park Venture Partners led the Series A round, with participation from Blue Vista Ventures and Connecticut-based Glade Brook Capital Partners. Joining Geofeedia’s board of directors will be angel investors Tim Kopp, former CMO of Indianapolis-based ExactTarget; David Gupta, vice chairman and former CEO of Chicago-based SDI; and Gene Delaney, director at San Jose-based Sanmina Corp.
Most of the funds will go toward growing Geofeedia’s 21-person team to about 40 in the next six months, Harris said. The funding will also go toward building infrastructure to house and manage massive amounts of data, which Harris put at about one billion data points.
Customer queries produce near real-time results — posts make it into Geofeedia’s system 15 seconds after they go live — that organizations can analyze, export or pull into different viewing modes. One mode places them as pins on a map, while another displays them in a waterfall format reminiscent of a Pinterest feed.
Harris said companies and organizations use Geofeedia to track conversations during special events and at specific nearby locations. He pointed out that the platform is not limited to hashtags or keywords and that businesses such as hotel chains monitor posts from their various locations to improve service.
“What we see is that consumers don’t type in, ‘Look at this #cockroach #Hyatt,'” he said. “They just take a picture of the cockroach and say, ‘Ew, look at this.'”
After natural disasters, Harris said, the company provides the platform for free to first responders and disaster-relief organizations. This helps them track the magnitude and scope of such events.
Geofeedia’s customers are all businesses or government organizations. They fall into four categories: law enforcement and public safety; media and journalism; corporate security and risk management; and brands and agencies. Platform access costs $150 per user per month and is available in yearly and multi-yearly subscriptions.
Geofeedia, founded in 2011, has 8,000 users across 300 organizations, up from 40 organizations at this time last year, Harris said.
“It’s our mission to align ourselves with businesses and government agencies doing good work with the technology,” he said.
Harris said Geofeedia carefullly chooses the groups it works with and that power users include Microsoft, CNN, The Associated Press, the Detroit Crime Commission, Amway and Mall of America.
Harris was a former senior VP at Priceline.com in the late 1990s before the travel bookings company went public. He was an investor in Geofeedia when it was founded, and he joined as CEO in 2012.