Social TV analytics startup Bluefin Labs has raised $12 million in a Series B round of funding, which means the company will be expanding its resources to help TV networks and marketers keep track of how audiences are responding to shows via social media sites.
Time Warner Investments led the round with participation from new investor SoftBank Capital and return investors Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures.
Bluefin Labs is best known for its flagship product, Bluefin Signals, an analytics platform that analyzes and organizes social media conversations about U.S. national television. The dashboard interprets the social media response — including tweets and Facebook posts — to more than 11,000+ TV shows and 346,000+ individual airings of those shows. It looks at 5 billion public-facing social media comments each month and then pairs those comments with more than 2.5 million minutes of linear TV time.
Although the product debuted in July 2011, Bluefin Labs was founded in 2008 and came out of the MIT Media Labs, with the goal of applying machine learning and cognitive science to the broader goal of understanding how audiences respond to TV shows and ads.
Companies that use the platform — which include mix of television networks, marketers and agencies such as CBS, MediaCom and MTV — gain access to social data about TV shows and commercials to inform the buying and selling of TV media.
Bluefin Labs said in a press release that it plans to use the new financing to accelerate growth of its sales and client services efforts. The company will also “continue to invest heavily in technology and R&D [research and development] to lead further innovation in the field of social TV analytics.”
“We are witnessing a huge shift in consumer behavior, as people now naturally turn to social media to voice their opinions about what they are watching on television,” said Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO, Bluefin Labs. “We are continuing to build out Bluefin’s services that allow us to provide enhanced data which enables our clients to glean more of an understanding of their audiences and target consumers.”
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