Vitrue Closes $17 Million Series C Round Funding; Announces Global Expansion Plans

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vitrue, the leading social media management software provider, today announced it has closed a $17 million Series C financing round led by Scale Venture Partners and Advent Venture Partners. Existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Comcast Interactive, and Dace Ventures will continue to participate. Vitrue also announced that Stacey Curry Bishop, partner with Scale Venture Partners, has joined the board.

“Marketing in social media has become a compelling way for businesses to engage consumers, and is a growing line in brands' budgets”

Vitrue’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform enables brands and marketing agencies to communicate with 450 million fans in 47 countries across more than 2,500 Facebook and Twitter accounts, emerging social media avenues, and mobile applications.

With this financing, Vitrue will expand the scope of the company, including:

Domestic office openings in seven markets that include New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati and Los Angeles
Three International office openings in London, Toronto and Singapore
Strategic product integration with best-of-breed social media application partners
Hiring between 100 and 150 new employees to support these endeavors

“With the explosion of Facebook, Twitter and mobile location-aware applications, the opportunity for brands to effectively engage and deepen relationships with consumers has never been greater,” said Reggie Bradford, CEO of Vitrue. “We will aggressively scale the company and continue delivering best in class solutions to our customers, enabling them to connect with consumers any time, any place.”

Silicon Valley-based Scale Venture Partners has funded some of the most well-known SaaS-based businesses, including Omniture and Exact Target.

"Marketing in social media has become a compelling way for businesses to engage consumers, and is a growing line in brands' budgets," said Stacey Curry Bishop, partner with Scale Venture Partners. "Just as brands are investing here, ScaleVP wanted to catch this trend. We believe that Vitrue's experienced management team and impressive performance to date positions them to scale globally on Facebook and beyond.”

Frederic Court, general partner at Advent Venture Partners, one of Europe’s most established venture and growth capital firms, said Vitrue has the potential to become the social media market platform of choice across Europe and globally.

“Social media is a global phenomenon and Facebook has reached a massive user base in Europe. To fully leverage this opportunity, marketers are turning to software delivered as a service to engage with their consumers, and Vitrue is at the leading edge of this trend,” Court said. “Vitrue’s superior approach to connecting brands with consumers, and ability to massively scale its platform position the company for strong international growth.”

About Scale Venture Partners

Based in Foster City, California, the ScaleVP team is a long-standing partnership with a consistent, top quartile track record of returns. The ScaleVP team's collaborative and active approach provides entrepreneurs a competitive advantage for growth and category leadership. Representative portfolio companies include Alimera Sciences, Box.net, Brightroll, Docusign, Everyday Health, ExactTarget, Hubspot, IPC The Hospitalist Company, mBlox, NComputing, Omniture, and ScanSafe. For more information, visit www.scalevp.com.

About Advent Venture Partners

Advent Venture Partners is one of Europe’s most established growth and venture capital firms, investing in technology and life sciences businesses run by great teams that want a pragmatic and well-connected partner by their side.

Top tier growth equity investors, Advent’s technology team backs highly differentiated and capital efficient technology-driven businesses in digital media, e-commerce, software and services. Our investments include: Cartesis, a growth capital software investment acquired by Business Objects for $300 million; Zong, a leading mobile payments solutions provider; Qype, Europe’s largest local search and review site; The Foundry, a buyout of the Academy Award winning global visual effects software vendor for the post-production industry; and Farfetch.com, an online fashion marketplace for independent fashion boutiques. www.adventventures.com

About Vitrue: Vitrue is the leading provider of social media publishing software, offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to help brands and agencies harness the marketing potential of social media and manage all of their social connections. Vitrue’s Social Relationship Manager (SRM) platform approach seamlessly unites the ubiquity of social networks, our deep understanding of user social media behaviors, and best of breed partner applications and services to give our customers a head start and competitive advantage through leveraging of the latest social, mobile and web innovations. Vitrue’s offerings manage 454 million fans across 2,000 Pages in 40+ countries. For more information, visit vitrue.com.