Social media man­agers, com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and con­tent man­agers with an eye on social man­age­ment can hard­ly fail to be a lit­tle wowed by the qui­et­ly spec­tac­u­lar rise of New York start­up, Sprin­klr. The com­pa­ny has recent­ly raised a cool $15 mil­lion in its sec­ond round of ven­ture funding.

Sign­ing mas­sive names under the radar

Con­sid­er­ing that the firm man­aged to raise $5 mil­lion rel­a­tive­ly effort­less­ly last year in the first round of its fund­ing, despite very lit­tle media pres­ence, it’s clear­ly impress­ing investors hand­some­ly.  Below the radar it might have been, but it still man­aged to attract some mas­sive brand names as clients with its suite of social media man­age­ment tools, amongst them Nike, Tar­get, Microsoft and Sam­sung.

Rais­ing invest­ment total­ing $20 mil­lion inside one year is a pret­ty daz­zling feat by anyone’s stan­dards.  But then, its ros­ter of heavy­weight brand names is con­tin­u­ing to expand, and around 80 per cent of them rake in annu­al rev­enues in excess of $1 bil­lion.  It now claims that it’s signed 200 house­hold names as clients.

Achieve­ments like this may make estab­lished rivals like Radian6, Involver and Wild­fire start feel­ing decid­ed­ly ner­vous.  And they should be, because Sprnklr’s CEO Ragy Thomas says he intends it to be the “Fer­rari” of the social media man­age­ment sec­tor, and he appears to be firm­ly on course to real­ize that ambi­tion.  Elab­o­rat­ing, he goes on, “The world’s most social brands con­sis­tent­ly choose Sprin­klr because we enable social engage­ment, acti­va­tion, and man­age­ment across mul­ti­ple social chan­nels, inter­nal func­tion­al groups, and dis­trib­uted geographies.”

A “most capa­ble” platform

He’s clear­ly per­suad­ed some big cheese investors.  The sec­ond round includ­ed fund­ing from heavy slug­gers like Bat­tery Ven­tures and Intel Capital.

Altime­ter Group part­ner and ana­lyst Jere­mi­ah Owyang says he’s not sur­prised by Sprinklr’s suc­cess and the atten­tion it’s get­ting from the investor com­mu­ni­ty.  In a study by Altime­ter, the up-and-com­ing firm came top of the tree as the “most capa­ble” plat­form in social media man­age­ment.  Owyang explained, “After con­duct­ing an inde­pen­dent review of 27 ven­dors, we iden­ti­fied Sprin­klr as the ‘most capa­ble’ plat­form to meet the needs of large enterprises.”

Start­ing off in 2008, Sprin­klr launched its unique soft­ware the fol­low­ing year and hit a year-on-year growth rate of 400 per­cent in 2012.  Now that’s a suc­cess story.