In 2017, TrendKite welcomed three C-level hires, expanded office space to accommodate its ever-growing team and continued to develop its big data-driven PR analytics platform (which now adds over 4 million articles daily to its ontology).
And just before the team welcomed the start of the new year, TrendKite secured an additional $11 million in funding, led by Harmony Partners.
The fact that we’ve consistently been able to raise [funding] from some of the best venture capitalists in the world validates that we’re delivering the operational excellence and financial growth top investors seek.”
CEO Erik Huddleston weighed in on the company's accelerated growth. “Our growth trajectory places us among the top fastest growing startups in the world,” said Huddleston. “We continue to innovate and bring a product to the market that people are responding to, which has led to incredible revenue and employee growth numbers. The fact that we’ve consistently been able to raise from some of the best venture capitalists in the world also validates that we’re delivering the operational excellence and financial growth top investors seek.”
December’s late round of funding puts TrendKite at nearly $50 million since its 2012 inception. This latest funding round will be put toward the company's machine learning engine, which leverages data to create content topics designed to produce the most earned media for brands and agencies, as well as identifies the best journalists these companies should be connecting with.
You can laser-target the right journalist with the right message at the right time."
When it comes to adding value for companies and PR professionals, TrendKite clearly defines their value. “Instead of spamming long lists of journalists from a legacy media contact database and hoping for the best, you can laser-target the right journalist with the right message at the right time,” said Patrick Barrett, director of product management.
Barrett shared that throughout 2018, the team will soon release a new interface that displays all content and metrics surrounding earned coverage called Discovery Homepage.
“We’ll also launch a new tool called Campaigns, which will make it easier than ever for customers to plan, execute and collaborate on campaigns from start to finish by organizing all their TrendKite activity (searches, dashboards, contacts, etc) into shareable campaigns,” said Barrett.
In addition to product releases, TrendKite plans to add another large stream of new employees, with its stacked new C-level team leading the growth over the course of the year.
“At the end of 2017, we made strategic hires strongly tied to our growth trajectory and goals, bringing in Kevin McKeown as the SVP of worldwide sales, Prabhakar Gopalan as VP of growth, revenue operations, customer success and retention, and Chris Lightner as the VP of client strategy,” said Jen Cantu, VP of people. “The addition of these significant roles will inform 75 to 100 future hires. 2018 will be a year we continue to bring on the best and brightest to help lead us into the next phases of success for TrendKite.”
