Enterprise Social Networking Platform Yammer Grabs $25 Million In New Funding

Enterprise social networking platform Yammer, has just raised $25 million in new funding led by U.S. Venture Partners with Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund also participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $40 million.

Additionally, U.S. Venture Partners’ Principal Mamoon Hamid will be joining Yammer’s board.

Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, recently expanded to become a more comprehensive platform for social networking within the enterprise.

As we wrote in our initial review of the new platform, Yammer added number of applications to its platform that increases its functionality beyond just a communications platform, including polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. And a new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content.

The company has been growing by leaps and bounds as more businesses turn to in-house social networking platforms for internal communications and now has more than 1.5 million verified corporate users, including employees at more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Plus, the startup is doubling revenue every quarter.

The new funding will be used to scale its operations, triple the size of its engineering team and significantly grow its sales organization. The company will also open offices in Europe and Australia.

Yammer has also added two new executives to the team. David Stewart, former director of product at Playdom and product lead at Google, has joined Yammer as vice president of product management. Mark Woolway has joined Yammer as vice president of corporate affairs, and was formerly managing director at Clarium Capital and the vice president of corporate development at PayPal.

Yammer faces competition from Jive, Salesforce’s Chatter, CubeTree and others. But the company’s founder David Sacks tells us that the ability to create a go-to corporate social network is a Facebook sized opportunity. If this is true, then there’s plenty of room for a number of players in the enterprise social networking space.

Sacks says that he believes Yammer is a head of the curve when it comes to bringing a social network to the enterprise, and feels confident that the platform will continue to grow despite being in a competitive space. And clearly, the company will now have the financial resources to help make that happen.