Sprinklr, a company that helps large enterprises like McDonald’s and Microsoft manage their social media presences, raised $105 million on Wednesday, valuing the company at about $1.8 billion.
Singapore-based investment firm Temasek led the round, which marks Sprinklr’s first major fund-raise from APAC investors. The Series F round brings Sprinklr’s funding total to $239 million.
Private investment group Wellington and the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board also participated.
While Sprinklr had a small foothold in Asia through its joint venture, Sprinklr Japan KK, CEO Ragy Thomas thinks the latest investment will ramp up growth in the region faster.
“While a bulk of our revenue comes from North America and Canada right now, we are making an effort to double down on Asia,” he said. “We’re now actively expanding into China.”
Most of the investment will be used to ramp up head count (Sprinklr currently has 1,200 employees in 13 global offices), but the rest will fuel product expansion.
Sprinklr is expanding beyond its focus on social media listening and publishing, and it will beta-launch a media planning tool within four weeks, said Thomas.
“We’ve taken significant market share [from] companies we competed with [several] years ago, like Radian6 and Crimson Hexagon, when we were known for earned media tracking,” he said. “Our advertising module is a quickly maturing part of our platform. Our vision is to give clients an understanding of where and how to spend their media dollars.”
Sprinklr’s move into paid media stems from acquisitions it made over the years, including social marketing agencies like Dachis Group and TBG Digital, data visualization tools like Postano as well as Booshaka, an audience segmentation tool that helps connect marketing automation and social platforms.
Sprinklr claims it competes with marketing clouds like Oracle and Salesforce, though it’s solely focused on social.
Sprinklr also aims to power a brand’s content marketing efforts on platforms like Facebook and Weibo, whether those assets are text, rich media, images or videos.
“We think the biggest development in advertising in the past few years was the rapid rise of sophistication in social targeting, which gives you guaranteed reach,” he said. “Email and data [are conversations] we can have in 12 months, but right now, we’re actively focused on adding more global 2000 brands as clients.”
