HootSuite Raises $165M Series B

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/hootsuite-raises-165m-series-b-round-from-insight-accel-and-omers-to-go-large-on-enterprise-social-media-monitoring/

by togasystems • 13 years ago

46 30 13 years ago

techcrunch.com

dollar2• 13 years ago

HootSuite is less than useless, as Twitter Terms of Service prohibit anything that might take eyes off of Twitter.

togasystems• 13 years ago

Obviously you are wrong. With 237 of the Fortune 500 companies using it, it must not be that terribly useless.

Disclosure: I am an engineer with HootSuite

toomuchtodo• 13 years ago

You're also aware that Twitter could at anytime disallow your use of their entire API ecosystem, correct?

dollar2• 13 years ago

237 of the Fortune 500 is a powerful reality distortion field. I've been right (Zynga) and wrong (Facebook) before, the future is notoriously hard to predict. The fact that anyone perceives any long term value to software with banner features like "scheduled tweets" is supremely irritating. By the time this slew of darling me-too software startups are ashes, the early stage investors will have already extracted their return. In the end, I suppose that is all that matters. What is most irksome is that HootSuite is effectively crippled because Twitter terms of service will not permit them to develop features that are in incredibly useful, and they will sue companies that do (TweetAdder). HootSuites entire business is predicated on an amicable relationship with Twitter, but if the business delivers features that are truly valuable, how do they prevent Twitter from commoditizing them within Twitters native feature set? This strategy is incredibly naive, and it's destined to fail.

crisachow14• 13 years ago

Hootsuite is quite useful. Unlike Twitter, you can schedule tweets and view your past scheduled tweets. They also provide a lot of different metrics (which I have yet to its full potential). The navigation is pretty good though I think some features could be added/moved around (for example, being able to schedule Instagram photos). But other than that, I give Hootsuite two thumbs up. Congratulations!!

slashCJ• 13 years ago

I agree. scheduled tweets is to Hootsuite what filters is to Instagram. Turns out practically every person that does anykind of marketing with social media in the world wants it

caniszczyk• 13 years ago

Tweetdeck does a good job with scheduled Tweets: https://web.tweetdeck.com/

johns• 13 years ago

https://dev.twitter.com/programs/twitter-certified-products/...

lewisflude• 13 years ago

Congratulation guys! Looking forward to see how this all feeds back into the product.

allsop8184• 13 years ago

Great to see another awesome Canadian company w/ exciting news today. Congratulations from all of us @shopify.

speeder2• 13 years ago

It saddens me that some companies, sometimes without revenue (I dunno if that is the case with HootSuite) get multi-million deals, and some brilliant startups by unknown people cannot get 50k USD borrowed by a bank...

Although my associate worked for a Angel Investing company and my main seed investor work for a investment bank, we still don't understand who get selected to get funded or not (we DO know the formal requeriments, but seemly meeting them only make possible to talk with some investors, but that is it, lots of investors will just outright ignore you)

photorized4• 13 years ago

Note that HootSuite is a very popular tool, almost every single marketer that I know is using it.

speeder2• 13 years ago

I know, we use it too, but it is not only HootSuite, there are several investments that get obviously excessively popular, sometimes not tech related at all too (like Eike Batista, that convinced Brazil government to give him 10 billion and lost it all somehow...)

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

(I dunno if that is the case with HootSuite)

From the article:

And it was already profitable.

pkaler• 13 years ago

Your lament/envy is misplaced in this particular case. Hootsuite sells into the enterprise and has tons of revenue.

It looks like you are a game developer by looking at your profile. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but game companies just aren't that great of an investment for investors. Game development is a hit based business and investors prefer to invest in scalable, repeatable models.

photorized4• 13 years ago

Congrats to the HootSuite team - that's a very impressive valuation.

We recently built our own social media data discovery and analytics platform, and whenever we run reports on software clients for top tweets - HootSuite is always in 1st or 2nd position. Nice market penetration there.

Plug below -

In case anyone is interested - ours is not designed to replace HootSuite but to complement it:

http://signup.itrendcorporation.com/

Would love to get some feedback from you folks.

livestyle• 13 years ago

The team over at Buffer must be pretty stoked to see how big this market really is.

drpgq• 13 years ago

Well at least they've ended their unpaid interns policy.

superconductor• 13 years ago

Yup, use them up, spit them out, ??? and profit.

patmcguire• 13 years ago

"One of the goals of the financing is to clean up our cap table. To this end, we are allowing former Seesmic shareholders to liquidate their positions. At the current valuation, you will realize an almost 40% return in the 11 short months that you’ve been an investor. We would greatly appreciate your help by selling your stake."

I don't know the situation, but that sounds odd.

photorized4• 13 years ago

I would view this as preparation for being acquired by a larger entity.

unknownian• 13 years ago

What happened to interesting (especially hardware) startups? Who wakes up in the morning and thinks, "I want to improve the social media experience of brands!"?

Oh that's right, they can't get funding because MBAs don't care about super laser tech or virtual reality devices, but whatever gets them the most money.

joonix• 13 years ago

Serious question, what happened to the companies that popped up in the 90s that:

* Helped enterprise clients manage their customer service email accounts

* Helped enterprise clients manage their web pages

Eventually "social media" will just become a normal part of the internet. Just another company taking advantage of the idiocy and fear prevalent in large enterprises. "Hmm, this social media thing sounds big. We need to be involved in social media. Who can we throw buckets of money at to pretend they are helping us with our social media?"

HootSuite Raises $165M Series B

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