Gigya, a startup that provides businesses with a suite of tools to make their sites more social, announced today that it had raised $ 15.3 million in new funding from Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, as well as the Mayfield Fund, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Adobe.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company reported that it already reaches 1 billion unique users a month through its more than 500 clients, but said that, supported by its new funding, it hopes to double its user base.
“We want to be the social technology for the rest of the Web,” said Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya.
About 20 percent of Gigya’s business is international, Salyer said, but added that it plans to expand its global footprint. The company recently opened an office in London and has strategic partnerships in Japan, but it’s now looking at Latin America and Australia, he said.
Gigya, which launched in 2006, competes with other social sharing startups, such as AddThis and ShareThis, as well as companies focused on commenting and gamification. Its technology allows users to log in with credentials from social networks, as well as share content, comment, or join social games on publishers’ sites. The tools not only increase traffic and time spent on site, Gigya maintains, they provide insights for the businesses and manage social identity data.
In the last year, the company said its sales more than tripled and it now works with more than 40 percent of the comScore top 100 U.S. web properties.
In a statement, Andrew Siegel, Advance Publications’ senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, said they made the investment in Gigya after a positive experience with the company as its client.
“Social infrastructure has become a requirement for online businesses, and Gigya’s approach of offering everything a site needs to be social has been validated by its continued customer growth,” he said. Last week, Advance Publications announced a $ 10 million investment in Unified Social, a startup that offers a social operating platform to the enterprise.
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