Linkfluence attracts $9m

Linkfluence, a social media intelligence company, has secured $9 million in funding. The investors included Ring Capital, Tikehau Capital, Sigma, Kreaxi, 360 Capital Partners and BNP Paribas Development.

PRESS RELEASE

Paris – June 15, 2020 – Linkfluence, a leading social media intelligence company that turns social data into valuable insights for global brands, announced today that it received $9m additional funding from Ring Capital, Tikehau Capital, through its Growth Capital fund TGE2, and its long-term historical investors including Sigma, Kreaxi, 360 Capital Partners and BNP Paribas Development.

With the new funding, Linkfluence will focus on addressing the growing needs for automated consumer insights from its customers as well as continuing its expansion to the US following the appointment of Guillaume Decugis as CEO in 2018.

Linkfluence has significantly invested in AI technology to enrich its SaaS social listening platform with new data structuring capabilities to address consumer behavior changes.
As a result, Linkfluence captures 200 million publications per day and interprets them automatically through Natural Language Processing (NLP) or computer vision. Linkfluence also structures the data using advanced topic models designed by industry experts to identify meaningful information for marketers such as brand or product attributes, market categories and trends or even consumer segments and communities – empowering them to directly take action. This enriched SaaS platform enables brands to overcome the limitations of social listening as well as traditional market research and delivers actionable and valuable insights in real time and on demand.

Jean-Michel Janoueix, member of the board of directors at Linkfluence and former executive at Kantar and IPSOS commented: “As a result of digital disruption, brands have to become more customer-centric. Linkfluence brings unique assets: comprehensive social data coverage including China, a deep understanding of consumer insights production through its social data practice, and strong AI technology to structure data. These strengths are enabling us to predict consumer behaviours rapidly for brands to react in time and to capture weak signals that can predict significant market changes.”

Through these strategic changes and leveraging on the acquisition of San-Francisco-based Scoop.it, Linkfluence was able to gain rapid traction in the US, which became its second largest market in less than a year. US new business is now on track to overtake France by the end of the year – Linkfluence’s home market where it works with 19 of France’s 25 most valuable brands as ranked by Kantar Millward Brown. As a result, Linkfluence saw a 75% yearly increase in MRR outside of France in 2019.

“Securing this additional funding in such challenging times is a strong sign of the strengths of the assets that the Linkfluence team has built as well as the quality of our client relationships. It will enable us to strengthen our lead in AI-enabled consumer intelligence, and to accelerate on our mission to empower global brands to turn social data into actionable insights.” said Guillaume Decugis, CEO of Linkfluence.

Nicolas Celier, Managing Partner at Ring Capital and Emmanuel Laillier, Head of Private Equity at Tikehau Capital added: ““As long-term partners to Linkfluence, we are delighted to be accompanying them in this important development phase, supporting their growth in the US and contributing to the enhancement of their consumer intelligence platform. We’ve been impressed by Linkfluence’s ability to sign major US brands as clients in its first year of operation on that market. It is a testament to the strength of the company’s technology and executive team.”

About Linkfluence:
Linkfluence is a leader in AI-enabled consumer intelligence. Its SaaS platform enables hundreds of global brands to derive actionable insights from social data and understand their consumers better and faster.

Linkfluence solves the limitations of traditional market research and social listening platforms by delivering in real time and through a SaaS platform the type of high-value insights historically requiring complex and lengthy ad hoc projects. Thanks to unique data structuring capabilities resulting from powerful AI technologies and industry-relevant market expertise, the Linkfluence platform enables marketers to address use cases such as brand perception measurement, community activation, content creation, campaign measurement, influencer marketing optimization, trend detection or customer experience analysis.

Optimized for large and complex organizations, Linkfluence’s platform ensures rapid adoption while providing a single source of data truth and consistent methodologies across teams. Linkfluence also brings true global coverage (US, Europe, Russian and Chinese social Web and online media / sites) and operates from 7 offices across the US, Europe, APAC and China.

About Ring Capital
Ring Capital is an investment ecosystem dedicated to fast growing tech and digital scale-ups. Ring Capital’s first fund of € 165M is positioned in the growth private equity segment. The team invests the funds by acquiring minority interests of € 3 to 15M in tech and digital companies to help them grow and scale through internationalisation and external growth.
The founders are Geoffroy Bragadir, successful web entrepreneur (founder and former CEO of Empruntis) and Nicolas Celier, ex-Partner of Alven Capital. They have around them a first-class operational team (ex-Criteo CTO, web marketing and data experts, etc.) and a community of experienced entrepreneurs, CEOs, and CTOs to support the growth of portfolio companies.

The managed funds come from institutional investors such as Tikehau Capital and bpifrance, as well as families and private investors.

Find out more at http://www.ringcp.com/