Social Media Analytics and Big Data SaaS Company, Circus Social, has raised $1 Million in a Pre-Series A Round led by Inflection Point Ventures, and other marquee investors based in the US, Singapore and India. These investors include Saurabh Gupta, Director (Data Strategy, Operations & Modernization) – DC OSSE; Ganesh Mohan, Head of Strategy – Bajaj Finserv; Samit Shetty, CEO – Navi FinServe Pvt Ltd, Royston Tay and Yang Bin Kwok, Co-Founders – Zopim and Srinivasan Venkita Padmanabhan, President and Global Head of Finance – Olam Group.
Founded by IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad Alumnus, Ram Bhamidi, and King’s College London Graduate, Prerna Pant, Circus Social helps brands and businesses get actionable business insights from social and digital data in real time through the use of Big Data, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning). Circus Social has clients across multiple industries in over 15 countries in Asia Pacific.
The Singapore and Bangalore based company plans to use the funds to accelerate its growth in other geographies, strengthen its sales, engineering and data sciences teams and scale new revenue streams.
Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, Inflection Point Ventures, says, “Circus Social already has an enviable list of clients in Asia and this investment will help them strengthen their core teams and accelerate their growth. Social listening has become a mainstay of the marketing strategy of most enterprises today.
“Brands want to know what their customers want and give it to them in real time. Plain vanilla social marketing is passé. Circus Social’s founding teams’ understanding of AI and its use in social listening has proven its mettle based on the numbers we have seen, thus making it a good opportunity for IPV to invest in the company,” Shah said.
Winner of ‘The Spark Awards 2018,’ by Marketing Magazine, an awards program for excellence in media and marketing, Circus Social was recognised as the “Best Martech Solution in Social Listening”.
Ram Bhamidi, Co-Founder and CEO, Circus Social, said, “Over 4 billion people are active on social media globally, collectively generating a massive amount of conversations, engagement and activity every day. Brands, marketers, researchers, analysts and businesses are struggling more than ever to make sense of all of this data in real- time.
“Our AI powered social listening and analytics platform uses big data architecture and AI/ML algorithms to empower companies with comprehensive data and actionable insights in real time,” Bhamidi said.
Prerna Pant, Co-Founder, Circus Social, said, “We look forward to accelerating our growth across the region and globally, and scaling our operations and offerings significantly over the next 12 months.”
With 4.8 billion internet users, and over 3.96 billion social media users globally, roughly 51% of the world’s population is on social media. An average user is on 9 social platforms, making the market size and need for big data analytics products extremely huge.
Growing at a rate of 30% per annum, the global social and digital data analytics market, the addressable market for Circus Social has reached $7 billion. Circus Social’s main SaaS platform for enterprises, 20/Twenty tracks all available data points and distils them in to signals for their clients, empowering companies with real data at real time.