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HootSuite gains $165m in funding

Insight Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and OMERS Ventures have invested $165 million in HootSuite to help the social media management platform grow.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Social media startup HootSuite has obtained $165 million in series B funding from a joint investment between Insight Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and OMERS Ventures.

HootSuite brands itself as a social media management platform that provides users with a way to post across several social networks from a single website. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr, among others. HootSuite has more than 7 million users worldwide, including Virgin, Sony Music, PepsiCo, HBO, and Panasonic.

Announced on Thursday, the venture-capital funding will provide the four-year-old platform with further opportunity for growth.

"This capital gives us additional resources to expand quickly and strategically into new markets, innovate rapidly, and deliver on our vision around the world," said HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes.

"As the first institutional investor and largest pre-IPO owner in Facebook, we have long believed in the inevitable relevance of social networks and social media at the consumer level," added Ryan Sweeney, managing partner of Accel Partners, which last month allocated $100 million to its Big Data Fund 2.

"What's become apparent is that social channels are also becoming the manner in which small businesses through to the Fortune 500 are opting to communicate with their customers and target markets."

HootSuite acquired Twitter client Seesmic in September 2012, and added a Chrome extension in March this year.

Insight Venture Partners, based in New York City, recently announced that it had raised a private equity fund of $2.57 billion in order to invest in e-commerce, software, data services, and online businesses. Prior to that, it also invested in Twitter and Tumblr.

Last month, Accel Partners contributed to a $3.8 million investment in startup Pixate. Over the years, it has also put funding toward Dropbox, Cloudera, Agile Software, Brightcove, Atlassian, Webroot, AdMob, Fusion-IO, and others.

When ZDNet spoke with Accel partner Ping Li in July, he said, "People are used to using things like Facebook and Apple and mobile [technologies]. Those things are changing the way people are looking and interacting with technology. Those things have just begun."

HootSuite is based in Vancouver, Canada, but has staff in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, and Hong Kong.

Leiberman, Sweeney, and Ruffolo have become members of HootSuite's board of directors as a result of the deal.

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