Chicago: Unmetric, a social media benchmarking company tailored for Fortune 500 companies, raises $3.2 million in series A round of funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. The fund will be used to continue developing its benchmarking platform, enabling companies to better survey and analyze the content strategy of a brand and the key terms to trigger customer engagement. Also, the fund will be used to expand its team and hire talented engineers to continue building and scaling product, a driven sales team to get traction going in the U.S. and Indian markets, and marketing to create and claim the social media benchmarking space. The company will also use the funds to provide Fortune 500 brands with universal social media benchmarks.

 Since the platform was launched in September 2011, Unmetric has been aggressively acquiring new customers, targeting the largest brands in the world, and counts distinguished companies like Citibank and Nestle as clients. With IDC projecting that the social media analytics industry will grow by 38 percent through 2014, Unmetric supplies a distinct, high-demand service for brands that stops companies from flying blind with their social media efforts. Unmetric is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Chennai & Coimbatore, and works with clients in North America, India and other regions. It currently employees 16 people across the U.S. and India. 

“Brands around the world today are witnessing an explosion in opportunities to reach customers through social media. We have seen many social media monitoring and listening tools, but what impressed us most about the company 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.,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Nexus Venture Partners.  

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.  

The company also announced an innovation addition to its platform, The Unmetric Score, which is designed to take benchmark algorithms to the next level. The score gives marketing managers and Chief Marketing Officers a snapshot of exactly how their brand performs next to others within their industry.

“The Unmetric Score provides intuitive and industry-first social media benchmarks. 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,” said Lakshmanan Narayan, CEO and co-founder of Unmetric.

Speaking on behalf of Nexus on their plans for investing in Unmetric, Laxmanan said, “I guess they liked the team, the opportunity we were going after, and that we had a viable and proven product that is, in essence, a technology platform that 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”.

Nexus Venture Partners is a venture capital fund, with offices in India and Silicon Valley. It has $320m under management and an active portfolio of over 35 companies across technology, internet, media, consumer, business services sectors. The Nexus team plays an active role in helping entrepreneurs and management teams build market leading businesses.

Talking about the market size of the company and competition, Lakshmanan adds, “Our estimate of the potential of the social media applications market is of the order of $1 billion. Of this, benchmarking is expected to account for a couple of hundreds of millions of dollars. Our current "competition" is a couple of junior executives slaving for 5 days to pull out a report that will have less than 5% of the detail that Unmetric is capable of generating. We've productized something that has been done with huge human effort so far - and made it a lot more efficient and insightful in the process”.