Influencer Platform Secures Growth Funds

In the US, data-based influencer marketing platform Influential has raised a $5m Series A round of funding, which it will use to ramp up its team and continue product development.

Influential works with more than 7,000 influencers on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine and YouTube. Earlier this year, the firm partnered with cognitive technology provider IBM Watson, tapping into its personality insights service to analyze large volumes of unstructured natural language data from social media profiles, across multiple channels.

The firm's new funding has been led by Capital Zed, with participation from institutional investors ROAR, Paradigm Talent Agency, Europlay Capital Advisors, Ace Fund and MSMCi, as well as several angel investors. This latest investment brings the total raised to date to $9m.

Ryan Detert (pictured), CEO and co-founder of Influential, comments: 'This Series A round, under the direction of Capital Zed, represents a significant step forward for Influential, as we continue to build our enterprise-level technology for brands and agencies, with a hyper-focus on unstructured data. We are ramping up hires and allocating resources towards our developers, data scientists and data partners, as we continue to change the market with our demographic and psychographic data approach'.

Influential, which has offices in Beverly Hills, New York City and Las Vegas, is online at www.influential.co .