Vertical Venture Partners and The Triton Fund announced their lead investment in SOCi.
Founded by UCSD Alum, SOCi Closes Series A To Deliver Social Media Management To The Real Estate Industry
SAN DIEGO, Mar. 17, 2017 / — SOCi, Inc., a leading SaaS enterprise solution for large-scale social media management has closed an $8.5 million Series A financing to fund its rapidly growing sales and marketing efforts and to expand its cutting edge technology development. Afif Khoury, a UCSD alum, is the founder and CEO of SOCi. The financing round was led by Vertical Venture Partners/The Triton Fund, a Silicon Valley /UC San Diego based technology fund founded by industry veteran, David Schwab. Co-lead was Grayhawk Capital, an Arizona based technology fund.
Additional participants include Seed San Diego, the Stanford University DAPER fund, Peninsula Ventures, a Bay Area-based enterprise technology venture fund, and Tallwave Capital, an Arizona-based B2B technology venture fund.
Founded in 2012, SOCi continues to solve the difficult workflow challenges faced by multi-location and multi-tenant businesses in social media management. SOCi’s powerful platform currently serves as the infrastructure and workflow solution that enables its multi-location brand (including franchise brand) and digital marketing agency customers to manage their tens of thousands of social media businesses pages on the platform. SOCi is fully integrated with the top social media and reputation management networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Yelp and others.
“A new day in social media has arrived where large enterprises are finding themselves having to manage hundreds or thousands of local social media pages on behalf of their storefronts, agents, advisors, clients, etc. SOCi’s world class engineering team is passionate about solving the difficult workflow management issues faced by these multi-location businesses” says Afif Khoury, CEO of SOCi.
Recently appointed CRO of SOCi, Warren Kay, states, “Efficiency and ROI for social media is key, and we know that SOCi can deliver that to its multi-location and multi-tenant customers. This most recent capital raise will help us grow out user base by scaling our marketing and sales efforts while opening new verticals and channels. ”
“We were thoroughly impressed with the SOCi team, the sophistication of the platform and the velocity at which their customer base is growing. The breadth of social media has reached an all-time high both in its importance to consumers as well as its adoption by businesses at all levels. SOCi is enabling the new era of social media management and is integral to an enterprise’s efforts to scale their local social media presence.” – David Schwab, Founder and Managing Director at The Triton Fund/Vertical Venture Partners.
About SOCi
SOCi is the leading enterprise solution for social media marketing at scale. SOCi’s all-in-one SaaS platform delivers a dozen or more functionalities, including content discovery, business intelligence, lead-generation, approval, task management, mass-scheduling and more, on top of a multi-layered permissions system that is architected to efficiently manage and generate measurable results at scale.
About Vertical Venture Partners
Vertical Venture Partners (VVP) is a venture capital firm focused on investments in companies that target vertical markets. Some vertical markets of interest include: Real Estate, Retail, Healthcare, Transportation, Insurance, Financial Services and Energy. Some technology areas of interest include: analytical applications, cloud applications, mobile, CRM, cyber-security and software infrastructure. Vertical Venture Partners will invest at any stage of a company’s growth and can help companies accelerate their business. For more information, interested parties may contact VVP at info@verticalventurepartners.com.
About The Triton Fund
The Triton Fund (TTF) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vertical Venture Partners (VVP). TTF invests in companies commercializing technologies being developed at UC San Diego (UCSD) or by UCSD alumni. Companies can originate in any school including, for example, Jacobs School of Engineering, Rady School of Management, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, or the Medical School. Technology areas of interest include cloud applications, analytics, social media, mobile, materials, medical devices, digital health, healthcare IT, instruments and cloud software infrastructure. Of particular interest are technologies that can be matched with a targeted vertical market. For more information, interested parties may contact TTF at info@thetritonfund.com.