Austin Ventures

Mass Relevance Leveraging Real-Time Content To Improve Social Ads

Mass Relevance presents itself as a social-experience platform that helps brands weave real-time social content into owned media, including websites, apps, and social pages. It is a certified Twitter partner and integrates content from Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and more, offering modules such as photo walls, streams, and Q&As with real-time filtering and moderation. The company emphasizes converged media, aligning paid, owned, and earned to amplify social engagement on landing pages and experiences. A notable case is Hollister's Flock-to-Unlock campaign, which used a promoted hashtag #InHollister and a Mass Relevance-powered display to generate 40,000 tweets and 600% more mentions. Hollister reported a 45% day-over-day sales lift and 44% of total sales volume from the promo product. Mass Relevance has raised $5.5 million across seed and Series A, with investors including Mike Maples Jr. (Floodgate), Austin Ventures, Metamorphic, and Battery Ventures, and plans to grow headcount from 93 to about 120.

Dachis Group Plans For A Future Where Social Data Is King

Dachis Group is positioning itself for a future where social data drives marketing. CEO Jeff Dachis notes a global opportunity beyond major platforms, pointing to roughly 400 social networks with >1M users each. Since its founding about five years ago with Austin Ventures backing, the firm has pursued growth through six acquisitions (including Powered, Stuzo, and ArchRival; the last in 2011). The company now employs 170 people across seven offices worldwide, down from about 220 in 2011. It operates a real-time big data analytics platform that ingests data from over 30,000 brands, billions of social signals, and hundreds of millions of accounts daily. Dachis licenses software and offers managed services—from strategy to execution—driven by sentiment analysis and machine learning. The group positions itself as platform-agnostic, citing competition with Buddy Media/Salesforce and Percolate, and indicating ongoing hiring and global expansion.

Umbel Measures Monetizable Content via Social Logins

Umbel is pursuing new metrics for measuring online content monetizability by analyzing social login data from readers associated with publishers. Its Revenue Generating Audience Insights service aggregates data from about 2.5 million registered users drawn from more than 30 sources to form a real-time, multidimensional audience profile that goes beyond basic demographics. The approach aims to provide near real-time visibility to improve collaboration between publishers and advertisers and to optimize monetization opportunities. The initiative has attracted funding from Austin Ventures, several angel investors, and Knight Foundation, which contributed 3.7 million USD. Knight Foundation's involvement signals an interest in expanding the measurement service as a value-add for the media industry, beyond traditional advertising.