Klout, the Valuator of your Online Influence, raised $30 Million in Series C of Funding

Klout, the start-up company which valuates the influence one has in the online environment, has recently acquired a third round of funding which has brought the company the amount of $30 million. This funding round has possibly been led by Kleiner Perkins, with the participation of IVP. This amount of money has been received after a $200 million valuation. At the moment, Klout refuses to make any statements and continues to present this new funding round as a rumor which has managed to spread quite a lot in the investment field.

If this funding round is for real, it means that this new amount of capital has significantly increased the value of the company, pointing once more to the importance social media has in the contemporary lives. Klout is a company which provides services destined to give a feedback regarding a person’s visibility in the online environment. This means that the company actually measures a person’s activity on some of the social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others. After measuring the number of interactions of that person with other persons on those social media networks, Klout is able to calculate the true reach of that person’s communications and scale them on a 1 to 100 Klout score. Recently, the company has also launched a new Klout Topic Pages, which is an instrument which indicates all the activity from the persons who have the greatest influence on the social media networks about a particular subject.

The fact is that the services provided by Klout are very useful for marketing and Public Relations pros as they can now see the real effect of their job and they can take measures in order to maintain a specific rhythm of growth. Moreover, this is a very effective tool in measuring the effects of a certain campaign and it is my personal belief that more and more companies will use the services provided by Klout in order to decide on the best advertising strategy they should come up with. It might just mean that, from now on, imagine advertising campaigns are going to be about getting brands in front of the most socially influential people.

As a result of this new funding round, Klout is now hiring. As they did not yet made this funding round public, we do not know the perspective of any of the team members on this series C of funding deal and on the manner in which the company intends to use this new amount of capital.

The company has been founded in the month of August 2008 by Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran and it is based in San Francisco. Klout has managed to raise venture capital in two rounds before this one, which has brought the company over $11 million, as the first round was in the amount of $1.5 million and the second, of $9.5 million. These previous series of investment have been led by Kleiner, Greycroft Partners, ff Asset Management and other angel investors.