Klout Lands $8.5 Million From Kleiner Perkins And Greycroft To Measure Social Influence
Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, has raised $8.5 million in new funding led by the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer recently launched sFund with participation from Greycroft Partners.
Context & Ripple Effects
Klout's $8.5 million round arrives weeks after Twitter's $200 million raise at a $3.7 billion valuation in December 2010, part of the same wave of capital flowing into companies built on top of the major social graphs rather than owning one. The lead comes from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer's newly launched sFund, its dedicated social investing vehicle, with Greycroft Partners participating.
The timing matters against a rumored IPO window: relationships in this period flag unconfirmed reports that LinkedIn has picked underwriters and that Facebook is weighing a listing next year. Investors appear to be positioning early in the social-data stack — influence measurement across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook — before those underlying platforms go public and reprice.
First-order effects
- Klout gains the runway to scale its influence-scoring beyond Twitter into LinkedIn and Facebook data, deepening the confirmed three-platform footprint it already claims.
- Kleiner Perkins' sFund secures an early position in social influence as a measurable asset class, while Greycroft adds a social-data bet alongside its consumer portfolio.
Second-order effects
- Brands and marketers get a standardized third-party score for targeting high-reach users on platforms they don't control, shifting some media-planning decisions toward whoever computes the metric.
- Rival influence-measurement startups are pushed to differentiate or seek their own institutional backing now that a marquee firm like Kleiner Perkins has legitimized the category.
Third-order effects
- If influence scores become a standard marketing currency, an analytics-and-targeting layer consolidates atop the social platforms — businesses structurally dependent on API access granted by Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
- The rumored Facebook and LinkedIn public offerings would give investors liquid benchmarks for the social sector, likely steering more venture dollars toward measurement and middleware plays riding those graphs.
The trend: Venture capital is concentrating on social-graph infrastructure — measurement, targeting and data layers built on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — ahead of the sector's rumored move to public markets.