Percolate, a New York-based startup that builds software to help brands create content for social media, closed a $9 million series A round of financing led by GGV Capital.

The company, co-founded and led by ex-Barbarian Group and Federated Media execs Noah Brier and James Gross, raised a seed round of $1.5 million late last year from a group of angel investors, including Kenneth Lerer, Sherry Redstone and Path co-founder Dave Morin.

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.

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.