IT industry veteran Ram Gupta joins Unmetric's board of directors

Chennai- and New York-based social media benchmarking startup Unmetric Inc. has appointed Ram Gupta, former PeopleSoft executive vice president (EVP), to its board of directors. He currently serves as a director on the boards of companies like Progress Software and FusionOps.

Commenting on the appointment, Lakshmanan Narayan, CEO of Unmetric, said, "The ongoing opportunity to draw from Gupta's knowledge and expertise will help us continue to arm the modern marketer with tools to ideate, compare and analyse the channels, content and campaigns of thousands of brands."

Gupta has more than 20 years of work experience, and since 2007, he has served as director on the boards of various public and private technology companies including S1 Corporation, Platform Computing, Cast Iron Systems, Accruent Inc., Knova Software, Plateau Systems (all of them acquired), Persistent Systems and Geek Net.

Prior to becoming an investor and advisor, he was the president and CEO of Cast Iron System (acquired by IBM). Before that, he was the EVP at PeopleSoft Inc., responsible for strategy, development, marketing, customer support, alliances and mergers & acquisitions. During his tenure, the market capitalisation grew from $3 billion to over $10 billion and the company was acquired by Oracle.

He had earlier also served as the Senior VP and GM at WebMD Corp. Gupta holds an MS degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Bachelors degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from BITS Pilani, India.

"Unmetric sits right at the convergence of increasing investment in social marketing and sophisticated data analytics platforms from global brands and agencies. I look forward to contributing to the future growth of this team and product," said Gupta.

Founded in February 2011 by IIT Madras graduate Narayan, Unmetric uses a combination of advanced algorithms and human computing power to deliver relevant data and benchmarking insights into social media metrics, and caters to several industries. Its deliverables essentially span key metrics such as content strategy, social media engagement, timing and frequency of tweets and posts on social sites.

Last September, the firm had raised $5.5 million in Series B round of funding, led by JAFCO Asia with participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. This followed $3.2 million in Series A funding, led by Nexus Venture Partners, in April 2012.

Unmetric says that it now hosts over 25,000 brands from across the globe to offer social media analysis across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram. Its clients also include Zocalo Group, Under Armour, Lowe's Home Improvement, MRY, GroupM, Volvo Cars and Dow Chemical Company.

In Feb this year, the company had appointed Rick Liebling as head of global marketing.