As part of the new round, GGV Capital partner Jeff Richards will
join the Percolate board. Initial investors Lerer Ventures and
First Round Capital also participated in the round.
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With the new round, Percolate will quickly staff up its product
and engineering teams. Today the company has a staff of 26 -- half
engineers and half a product team pulled from ad agencies,
traditional publishers and journalism.
The offering is software as a service and aims to solve an
increasingly vexing problem for brands that have at this point
spent millions building and maintaining a presence in social media.
"The biggest problem facing brands in these channels is figuring
out how to create content and what they want to talk about," said
CEO Noah Brier.
Percolate's technology uses algorithms and machine learning to
find relevant content on the web and then allow them to comment and
present that content in social channels. If Buddy Media (now
Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and others helped build a social
presence, Percolate is about filling channels like Facebook,
Twitter, Tumblr and corporate blogs with content.
There are also applications for media. Reuters' Counterparties blog, edited by Felix Salmon, runs on
Percolate technology.
Mr. Brier says Percolate has 30 paying clients such as American
Express, Diageo, GE and Xerox, which pay a monthly licensing fee
for the software and that the company was briefly profitable last
year.