Growing Its Influence, Klout Gets Strategic Investment From Microsoft — And Serious Bing Integration
And Serious Bing Integration — Klout hasn't just defied influential tech pundits, its social reputation scorecard has won them over. Now the sometimes-controversial startup is aiming at search.
Context & Ripple Effects
Klout's arc runs from its $8.5 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Greycroft in January 2011 through a stretch of pundit skepticism about whether an 'influence score' was a real business. That skepticism cracked in August 2012, when Arrington published his reversal on Klout and put his own money in — weeks before Microsoft's check arrived.
The deal also fits a deliberate Microsoft pipeline: the company launched its Bing Fund in July 2012 to take stakes in online startups, and this investment extends that playbook from cash-and-advice to deep product integration. The pickup across eight outlets — including Bing's own blog, AllThingsD, VentureBeat, and Betabeat — shows how much attention a Bing-Klout pairing commanded in the Google-dominated search market.
First-order effects
- Klout gains Microsoft capital plus distribution most startups can't buy: its influence scores are now wired directly into Bing search results, moving the company from standalone scorecard to embedded search signal.
- Microsoft gets a proprietary social-authority data layer for Bing at a moment when its search engine needs differentiators against Google beyond raw index size.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to answer with its own authority or identity signals in rankings, since Bing can now claim results weighted by measured social influence.
- Other consumer-data startups get a template: rather than chasing independent scale, they can sell their dataset into a major platform via a strategic stake — the Bing Fund model made concrete.
Third-order effects
- If social-authority signals prove out in Bing's results quality, search ranking shifts structurally from link-graph centrality toward identity-based reputation, making influence-scoring firms acquisition targets or infrastructure vendors rather than destinations.
- Corporate strategic investors become a viable alternative financing path for consumer web startups, trading independence for guaranteed distribution inside an incumbent's product surface.
The trend: Search engines are acquiring or investing in social-reputation data layers to differentiate ranking quality, pulling influence-scoring startups from standalone products into embedded infrastructure.