After Apple acquires Topsy, rival DataSift gets venture funding

DataSift, British rival of Topsy, the Twitter-tracking company which Apple acquired for about $200 million (See: Apple acquires social media analytics firm Topsy), has attracted a $42 million investment from venture capitalists who expect its valuation at at least $1 billion.

The investment, one of the largest ever for a British technology start-up, comes from a consortium of venture capitalists led by New York-based Insight Venture Partners. It brings the total capital raised by DataSift to over $70 million.

According to Datasift founder Nick Halstead, the cash injection would speed up the growth of the company's sales team, and help develop its technology for new markets as it moved closer to a major flotation.

Halstead told The Telegraph that one did not get investment from Insight Venture Partners unless they thought it would be a billion-dollar business.

He said he was very much focused on getting this one to flotation.

Jeff Horing, Insight Venture Partners, managing director would join the DataSift board.

Halstead is known in the IT industry as the inventor of the Twitter ''retweet'' button at a previous start-up, Tweetmeme. His innovation was quickly accepted by Twitter itself and integrated into the service.

DataSift is just one beneficiary of the growing interest in social-media companies following Twitter's IPO, according to commentators.

According to HootSuite Media Inc, which helps users of social media plan their posts and personalise their feeds, interest from private equity and growth fund investors doubled after Twitter's IPO, Bloomberg reported.

Bloomberg quoted HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes as saying, the company was not in active conversations for funding right now, but would meet up with folks that it might want to be in touch with down the road. The company raised $165 million in August, also led by Insight Venture Partners.

He said, they were looking to understand social marketing and advertising.

The investor interest is in total contrast to the scenario last year, when Joe Fernandez, CEO of social-media startup Klout Inc, said he saw a marked decline in investor interest after the May 2012 IPO of Facebook Inc, the world's largest social network, which fell from its $38 IPO price, according to Bloomberg.

However, following Twitter's IPO, according to Fernandez, he had found himself in demand with investors and at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference last month, he took back-to-back meetings with investors for two days.