Unmetric Raises $3.2M In Series A Round Led By Nexus Venture Partners

Social media benchmarking company Unmetric Inc has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. Unmetric will use the funds to continue developing its benchmarking platform, enabling companies to survey and analyze the content strategy of a brand and the key terms that are triggering customer engagement. Unmetric will also be using the round to further expand its team in the US.

Headquartered in Chicago with offices in Chennai & Coimbatore, Unmetric works with clients in North America, India and other regions. It launched its service last September although the firm was founded in 2010 by two executives working at Vembu Technologies, Lakshmanan Narayan and Kumar Krishnasami.

Using a combination of advanced algorithms and human computing power, Unmetric delivers data and benchmark insights for various industry sectors that were previously unavailable, such as content strategy, engagement, growth, timing and frequency of tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook.

Unmetric also formally announced its Unmetric Score, a compilation of over 24 qualitative and quantitative metrics measuring online brand performance vis-à-vis competitors on Thursday.

"The Unmetric Score provides intuitive and industry-first social media benchmarks," said Lakshmanan Narayan, CEO and cofounder of Unmetric. "With companies like Pepsi and Coke, or Ford and GMC hinging on their rivalries to drive business and engage their customers, the Unmetric Score is an intuitive, yet comprehensive way to gauge performance every month."

The score gives marketing managers and CMOs a snapshot of exactly how their brand performs compared to peers within the industry.

Each brand receives a separate score for its Facebook and Twitter profiles, and when used in tandem with the Unmetric platform, the Unmetric Score supplies brands with a snapshot of their competitors' performance. Unmetric even hosts a public scoreboard that presents the Unmetric Score in a table for each sector, making it easy to view how performance changes from month to month.

It counts companies like Citibank and Nestle as clients. As per IDC, the social media analytics industry will grow by 38 per cent through 2014.

"Brands around the world today are witnessing an explosion in opportunities to reach customers through social media," said Jishnu Bhattacharjee from Nexus Venture Partners.

"We've seen many social media monitoring and listening tools, but what impressed us most about Unmetric is that its technology platform uniquely mines the much-needed benchmarks from the deluge of social media data to provide firms with actionable insights on how they are performing against their competitors," he added.

Another player in this business is Social Wavelength, which recently raised second round of angel funding from four investors including two existing investors Sunish Sharma and Jayendra Shah.

Salorix Inc is another social media marketing and analytics firm which also raised $3.5 million in Series A investment round, co-led by Inventus Capital Partners and Nexus Venture Partners.