Piqora Secures $7.7 Million in Series A Funding Led by DFJ, Launches Industry’s First Conversation Manager for Instagram
San Mateo, CA (PRWEB) April 24, 2014 -- Piqora (http://www.piqora.com), the leader in marketing and analytics for visual social networks Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, among others, today announced it closed a Series A investment of $7.7 million led by DFJ with participation from Freestyle Capital, Baseline Ventures, Lazerow Ventures, Firebolt Ventures and Altos Ventures, bringing total financing to over $11 million to date. Additionally, the company announced the launch of the industry’s first centralized Instagram Conversation Manager.
Piqora’s ‘Instagram Conversation Manager’ is the only monitoring product available that enables brands to engage their Instagram communities outside Instagram’s mobile app, using a web-based dashboard. Instagram Conversation Manager aggregates comments and ‘@mentions’ from multiple Instagram profiles into a single feed, helping brands respond and track conversations without the pain of logging-in and logging-out of accounts. Brands such as West Elm, Zales, JustFab, and Benefit Cosmetics have already created centralized accounts with Piqora to converse with their Instagram community and monitor historical comments.
Piqora plans to use the new funding to advance its already leading position in the visual marketing space by adding more image recognition technology engineers and customer success strategists for its rapidly growing customer base. The new capital will also go towards developing deeper visual analytics and expanding its content management and CRM capabilities to include other networks. The company plans to open more offices across the US and double its workforce within next 12 months.
“The visual web is a two-way street where brands and consumers are discovering each other, communicating visually, expressing tastes and understanding intent,” said Sharad Verma, CEO and Co-Founder of Piqora. “This latest investment will allow us to continue executing on our vision of bringing brands and consumers together in new ways to foster deep, authentic relationships.”
"The power of the visual web is an enormous opportunity for the next iteration of consumer discovery and engagement,” said Mohanjit Jolly, DFJ Partner. “The Piqora team is executing extremely well on this huge vision. As social media, especially via visual channels, becomes massively important to business success, Piqora will be increasingly crucial to the way brands and retailers market themselves."
With 23 employees and billions of images in its visual web index, Piqora is continuously launching tools to make marketing across the visual web easier.
Earlier this year Piqora launched ‘Foto Gallery’ to allow brands to source, moderate and publish the best user-generated photos from Instagram to their website, Facebook and other online channels. The company also launched ‘Multiple Profile Management’ for its Instagram analytics suite, enabling agencies and brands with multiple accounts on Instagram to see all audience and engagement data in a single web-based dashboard.
Since 2013, Piqora has worked with over 300 customers including Crate & Barrel, Steve Madden, Etsy, and Wayfair; tracked ROI and the pin-to-purchase funnel for hundreds of brands, and has run over 600 Pinterest and Instagram photo contests, delivering over half a billion brand impressions. Piqora’s image recognition technology analyzes millions of images daily to produce over 50 reporting metrics that help brands get insights into trending pins and products.
About Piqora
Piqora is the leader in marketing and analytics for visual, interest-based networks such as Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram. Piqora already has hundreds of well-known retailers, brands and publishers using its promotions and analytics engine to easily identify and connect with influential brand advocates, gain actionable insights into trending images, run photo and pin contests, and measure key ROI and engagement metrics to quantify brand engagement across visual networks. Top brands working with Piqora include Crate & Barrel, Etsy, Z Gallerie, Wayfair, and Steve Madden. For more information on Piqora visit http://www.piqora.com.
About DFJ
DFJ is a venture capital firm that partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs who set out to change the world. Since 1985, DFJ's core funds have raised $4B, which has been deployed in more than 300 portfolio investments, including AdMob, Baidu, Box, Foursquare, Skype, Hotmail, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, Twitter, Tumblr and Yammer. DFJ works with companies at seed, early and growth stages, with the goal of creating iconic and lasting businesses. DFJ pioneers investing in emerging markets including consumer and enterprise information technology, digital media, and disruptive technologies. Learn more at dfj.com.
Sharad Verma, Waluzi Inc., https://www.piqora.com, +1 (408) 594-9728, [email protected]
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