Categorie: Venture

Tiger Pistol, an Australian startup offering social media marketing tools that it describes as both “small business friendly” and “enterprise powerful”, is coming out of its closed beta test today and launching to the public. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in angel funding.

Co-founder and CEO Stephen Hibber says that the goal was to create something that could take most of the difficulty and uncertainty out of creating marketing campaigns on social networks. You can start off with pre-built campaigns and templates, so you don’t have to create anything from scratch, and you’re tapping into Tiger Pistol’s knowledge about best practices.

Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures. The startup previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding from most of the same backers — Battery is the only addition.

Adaptly, a startup that manages ad campaigns across multiple social networks, just announced that it has raised $10.5 million in a Series B round of funding. At the same time, it’s launching a new product called Evergreen to help advertisers promote their social network content.

The round was led by Valhalla Partners, with participation from Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo — all three are investing in Adaptly for the first time. The company previously raised a $2.7 million round from First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and others. Adaptly says all of its previous backers invested in the new round.

Virurl, a startup that helps advertisers promote their content virally, is launching its public beta test today. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

Here’s how the Virurl model works: Advertisers upload the content that they want to promote, then set a campaign budget and a cost-per-click rate that they’re willing to pay. Then users can browse the content and share it with their friends via social networks or email. For each click that they generate, users earn points that can be redeemed for rewards or cash. (Any proceeds from Facebook clicks are donated to a charity of the user’s choice.)

Right after racing to the top of the App Store charts, Viddy just announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a long list of celebrities — not just tech celebrities, but also the kind that non-techies have heard of.

Here’s who invested: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Omniture founder Josh James, Skull Candy chairman Jeff Kearl, Roc Nation (the record label and entertainment company co-founded by Jay-Z), Overbrook Entertainment (founded by Will Smith and manager James Lassiter), ShoeDazzle founder Brian Lee, professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, soccer star Gerard Pique, and (I’m quoting from the press release here) “pop culture icon” Shakira.