Five years ago we were just four people in a room, with a lot of ideas and not enough money to develop them. Month after month, year after year, we worked hard and innovated relentlessly, winning prizes and awards along the way. Today, we have grown the business beyond a group of friends into an industry leader with more than 70 employees and offices across Italy, the UK and US. Buzzoole’s first five years have been an exciting journey: every challenge encountered has contributed to the growth of our company and to the advancement of the Influencer Marketing industry. Today, we hit another milestone in our journey, an important one, which we couldn’t have done without the ongoing support of our partners and stakeholders.
I am happy to announce that Buzzoole has closed a new round of funding. This latest round (Series A) of $8.9 million adds to our last round bringing the company’s total funding to date to over US $10 million. The round was led by StarTIP (Tamburi Investment Partners – TIP) and “Vertis Venture 2Scaleup”. Existing investors R301, Brahma AG, Impulse VC, Panda Partecipazioni and ScaleIT Ventures also participated.
The capital increase will boost Buzzoole’s international expansion – in particular in the UK and US – while allowing us to drive further product innovation and to accelerate our R&D and platform development, aimed at improving measurement and transparency in the Influencer Marketing space.
Our platform uses a proprietary technology based on big data and machine learning, allowing us to advance Influencer Marketing to next level. By using cutting edge image recognition, audience analytics and natural language analysis, GAIIA – the digital brain behind our services – is able to match Creators and Brands based on brand affinity at scale. Technology is also at the core of helping us to answer the industry’s biggest challenges and sits at the centre of our fraud detection system aimed at dealing with fake engagement, arguably the biggest challenge currently faced in this space. Thanks to our exclusive collaboration with acclaimed global measurement company Nielsen we have also moved measurement in Influencer Marketing forward, answering marketer demands and affording campaigns the ability to stand shoulder to shoulder with more traditional media buys.
I believe that we have already made good progress towards our goals and have seen a particularly strong return in 2018, during which the business has doubled and our database of Creators has topped 270.000 people worldwide.
I want to say THANK YOU to our investors, to our clients and Creators, and to the Buzzoole team for making this possible. Please join me in celebrating this exciting new chapter in our journey.
