Klout, a startup that helps people measure how influential they are across a variety of social media sites, announced today that it has scored $8.5 million in a round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins.
The investment is part of Kleinera4‚¬a4„s $250M sFund for social startups, and the firma4‚¬a4„s Bing Gordon will be joining Klouta4‚¬a4„s board of directors.
The San Francisco, Calif., based company says it will use the funding to expand its engineering team to include more online services than just Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Ita4‚¬a4„s also aiming to expand the consumer experience to help users make more sense of their online reputation, and potentially make better use of it as well.
Klout ranks a user based on how much influence they have on a particular site so they know how they stack up against all other users. On Twitter, the service estimates how many people pay attention to your tweets out of all of your followers. It also shows your top tweets ranked by how many thousands of people they ultimately reached through retweets. The service performs similar ranking for Facebook and LinkedIn, and it also labels you as either a a4‚¬Aprofilera4‚¬¯ or a4‚¬Alistenera4‚¬¯ on social media sites.
Greycroft Partners participated in the funding round, along with angel investors including ff Asset Management, Paige Craig, Howard Lindzon and Thomas McInerney. The company previously raised $1.5 million in angel funding, bringing its total funding to over $10 million.
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People: Bing Gordon
People: Bing Gordon
Devindra Hardawar is VentureBeat's lead mobile writer and East Coast correspondent. He studied philosophy at Amherst College, worked in IT support for several years, and has been writing about technology since 2004. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can reach him at devindra@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @Devindra.
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