SocialPandas Secures $1.5 Million in Seed Funding, Led By True Ventures

Grazed from SocialPandas.  Author: PR Announcement

SocialPandas (www.socialpandas.com), a startup provider of social selling applications, today announced that it has closed a $1.5 million round of seed funding led by True Ventures, a premier early-stage investment firm. The oversubscribed round also includes prominent angel investments from former Salesforce.com, VMware, and Apple executives as well as the Alchemist Accelerator. The company will use the funds to fuel product development for a launch in 2013.

“Social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn represent enormous opportunities for new revenue streams for business-to-business (B2B) companies,” said Mark Trang, CEO & Co-Founder of SocialPandas. “Enterprises can track vanity metrics like Fans and Followers. However, no comprehensive tools exist for sales teams to discover new leads, engage top prospects, or optimize deal pipelines across social channels. Sales professionals are stuck using pre-social CRM tools, email, and phones while their customers are spending more time on social networks. We’re excited to bridge this gap with a platform built from ground-up that lets sales teams finally ‘speak social’ and compete in the social era.”

SocialPandas is building a social selling platform that converts relationships and activities on social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn into actionable leads, pipeline, and revenue for B2B sales teams. The platform discovers and ranks new leads by surfacing relevant activities and contact profiles across social networks. Unlike traditional tools like email that automate one-way mass messaging, SocialPandas will enable authentic 1-to-1 conversations between companies and their prospects that are integrated with existing CRM systems, including Salesforce.com.

“Enterprises have begun to tap social networks for key functions including customer service, marketing, PR, recruiting, and internal collaboration,” said Phil Black, founding partner at True Ventures. “But until now, sales teams didn’t have the right tools to succeed in the social era. We’re thrilled to partner with the team of CRM veterans at SocialPandas to harness the power of social networks to transform the way B2B companies sell and generate revenue.”

The SocialPandas team consists of top SaaS technologists and marketers that have built and scaled award-winning products at industry leaders including Salesforce.com, LivePerson, Appirio, EchoSign, and webMethods. SocialPandas already has several customers using an early preview of its product to generate leads and revenue from social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn. SocialPandas will use the seed funding to grow its product development team in preparation for a launch in the first half of 2013.

SocialPandas is selectively partnering with B2B companies through an exclusive product preview program and will accept a limited number of additional companies through 2012. The company also is recruiting for a number of key product development positions. For more information on the customer preview program or open positions, please visit www.socialpandas.com.