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Lithium Technologies raises $18 Million
By siliconindia
Emeryville: Lithium Technologies, which provides white-label social networking tools for enterprises, has closed $18 million round of series C equity funding, adding two new venture capital partnerships - DAG Ventures and Tenaya Capital, along with three current investors participating in the round - Benchmark Capital, Emergence Capital, and Shasta Ventures.
According to the company, the new funding will support the company's current growth rates well into the future and solidify its market-leading position. Founded in 2001, Lithium provides social Customer Relationship Management (social CRM) solutions, giving companies the ability to create and manage their own social customer networks, centering around community applications and sophisticated integration with traditional CRM systems and conversations across the social web. The company has launched several products this year including the community health index, the tribal knowledge base and lithium mobile along with the content moderation solution from the Keibi Technologies acquisition.
"Our customers have been extremely successful in building and managing their social customer networks with the science in our software as well as the expertise of our superb staff. That success has fueled Lithium's explosive growth in the last 18 months. The additional funding and venture partnerships will provide us with a tremendous lift into 2010 and beyond," said Lyle Fong, Founder and CEO, Lithium Technologies. "This is an exciting moment for Lithium as we will now use these resources and momentum to be even more aggressive further extending our leadership in social CRM and customer communities, while continuing to generate multi-million dollar returns for our customers."
As Chief Marketing Officer, Sanjay Dholakia is responsible for driving Lithium's vision, go-to-market strategy, and customer acquisition programs. With its market strategy, the company has even more exciting plans to drive customer success and business returns in the form of accelerated innovation, brand promotion, and reduced support costs. Industry leaders like Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion (RIM), Univision, and PayPal already rely on Lithium to deliver industry-leading solutions for customer-to-customer interactions.
"In a period when most companies were suffering from macro-economic pressures, Lithium thrived and built a great team with powerful solutions," said Peter Fenton, Partner, Benchmark Capital. "With the latest results and financing, Lithium is now uniquely positioned to dominate this emerging market."
