San Jose: The science behind intelligent social media advertising, Compass Labs has secured $6 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Presidio Ventures. The fund will be used to further invest in the Compass Labs IQ (CLIQ) social media advertising platform, increase sales and marketing efforts and expand into international markets.

Headquartered in San Jose, the company was co-founded in 2009 by Dilip Venkatachari and Arjun Jayaram. It applies science to social media advertising with CLIQ to execute and measure for agencies and their brands. The investors in the company include New Enterprise Associates, Presidio Ventures, Triple Point Capital, Jim Clark and others.

“This new area of social media intelligence will introduce new players, new data sets and new customer behavior metrics. This funding will help us stay one step ahead of these changes and make Compass Labs the company that provides agencies and brands the right set of tools to maximize advertising effectiveness across social networks,” says Dilip Venkatachari, Co-Founder and CEO, Compass Labs.

Prior to co-founding Compass Labs, Venkatachari led Google’s mobile ads business and ran PayPal’s risk and fraud management, financial services and compaliance. He has co-founded and led two successful startup-companies CashEdge and CommerceSoft. Venkatachari holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, M.S. in electrical engineering from Rice University, and a B.Tech in electrical engineering from the IIT, Madras.

“NEA is excited to partner with businesses that are leading the transformation in how we connect data and customers. The company is uniquely poised to take the revolution in social media to its next phase by providing more relevant intelligence from its exploding platform and making it usable for all stakeholders,” sayse Kitty Kolluri, General Partner, NEA.

Founded in 1978, NEA is a VC firm. Since its founding, the firm has backed more than 170 companies that have gone public and invested in more than 290 companies that have been successfully merged or acquired. Over the time, the company has grown to $11 billion and some of the portfolio companies include Salesforce, Groupon, Data Domain among several others.

“We are convinced that the company has built the best technology in the industry with CLIQ, its social media and advertising platform. This investment will help facilitate the development of new technology at the company and support its expansion into new markets,” says Shun Aramaki, Presidio Ventures.

Founded in 1998, Presidio Ventures is the wholly owned early stage investment arm of Sumitomo Corporation. Since its inception, the firm has invested in over 100 US startups for a total investment of $200 million. As a strategic investor, they work with their companies to expand their business in the Japan and Asian markets.