NEW YORK & PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sprinklr, the most complete social media management platform for the enterprise, today announced it has acquired Little Bird, a Portland-based technology company that helps brands analyze connections across the social web to discover top influencers who can galvanize word-of-mouth marketing; build like-minded communities and create relevant content to increase engagement; and identify early-movers to accelerate the discovery of trends.
According to eMarketer, seventy-five percent of marketing and communication professionals say that identifying the right influencers is the biggest challenge when building an influencer engagement strategy. Little Bird’s technology addresses this problem in a unique way by leveraging contextual segmentation and social graph analysis to discover the best influencers based on their reputation around specific topics and conversations, not their follower count.
Little Bird’s technology will enhance Sprinklr’s audience insights, segmentation, advertising, and analytics capabilities as part of the only unified platform for enterprises to engage customers and manage their experience at scale. As part of Sprinklr’s complete platform, the company’s technology will bring actionable insights to each customer-facing department, allowing marketers to find potential evangelists and reach them with highly relevant content or ads; care teams to surface experts that can, in turn, support a wider community of customers; and research teams to better understand what their most valued customers think about their product.
Microsoft, for example, uses Little Bird’s technology to support a core pillar of its product marketing strategy. “Little Bird’s insights are helping our team speak like a living, breathing member of our customer communities,” said Aileen McGraw, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft.com.
“We live in an age of connected and empowered consumers where it no longer matters what companies say about themselves – it’s what their customers say that determines whether a business will fail or thrive,” said Ragy Thomas, Founder & CEO of Sprinklr. “As the market consolidates from best-of-breed to best-of-suite solutions, we’re thrilled to have Little Bird’s talented team bring its technology to the world’s most complete social media management platform for the enterprise, and give our clients a deeper understanding of the trends that matter most so they can cut through the noise and create more personal, consistent, and informed experiences for their customers.”
Founded in 2011, Little Bird secured seed funding in 2012 from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and other tech industry leaders. A second round of funding from the Oregon Angel Fund followed in early 2014, and a round in 2016 led by Jason Calacanis’ AngelList Syndicate fueled a new phase of growth and innovation.
“Our influencer discovery and research technology has delivered significant value to product and content marketers, customer care teams, market intelligence groups, and many others at some of the world’s best known brands,” said Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Founder & Chairman of Little Bird. “Sprinklr offers a unified system of engagement that helps each of these functions make use of social media at scale. Now, with deeper influencer-driven insights, those customer-facing teams and the enterprise they support will be that much smarter.”
The acquisition, Sprinklr’s eleventh overall, comes on the heels of the company’s latest funding round in July, when it raised $105 million at a $1.8 billion valuation. Sprinklr saw dramatic growth last year – becoming, in Q3 2015, one of the fastest enterprise SaaS companies in history to eclipse $100 million in annual revenue. That growth is the result of a strategic shift in the way brands are using social across the enterprise – from marketing to care, research, sales, commerce, advertising, and beyond – a trend that Sprinklr anticipated from the beginning and was purpose-built to address.
For more information, visit the Sprinklr blog.
About Sprinklr
Sprinklr provides the most complete enterprise social technology in the world, designed to help large companies collaborate across their entire organization to create intuitive, superior customer experiences across every social channel. The company is revolutionizing customer engagement in 150+ countries for more than 1,200 brands, including Nike, McDonald’s, Microsoft, P&G, Samsung, more than 50% of the Fortune 50, and nine out of ten of the world’s most valuable global brands. Called “the most powerful technology in the market,” Sprinklr powers more than four billion social connections to help the enterprise reorient its business around the customer in the age of digital transformation. Headquartered in New York City with more than 1,200 employees globally, Sprinklr works with a powerful group of partners that includes Deloitte Digital, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft. For more information, visit sprinklr.com or chat with us at @sprinklr.
