Viralheat Grabs $4.25 Million For Affordable Social Media Tracking And Intelligence

Viralheat, the social media measurement tool that allows content producers to monitor consumer-generated content on the Web in realtime, announced today that it has closed a $4.25 million series A round of funding. The round was led by the venture firm Mayfield Fund and adds to the $75K of seed capital Viralheat raised back in December 2009.

The startup plans to use this new infusion of capital to expand its engineering team, create new products and services for consumer analytics and engagement, and accelerate customer acquisition and revenue growth. As it is, Viralheat faces plenty of competition in the social media analytics and tracking space from Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, ScoutLabs, and Omniture to name a few, but the top factor that distinguishes Viralheat from other startups is its affordability. For $10 per month, users can track 10 profiles on the site, and for $40, you can track 50 profiles.

Viralheat has been quietly adding integrations and tools to deepen its feature set and provide customers with a more robust suite of trackable trends, sentiment, influencer data, analytics and intelligence. But, as Viralheat CEO Raj Kadam said recently, the future of this space relies not just on a company being able to track present influencers (though offering 360-degree views of the top evangelists, content producers, etc. is certainly important), but being able to predict what is going to happen next, like what products are about to explode and what consumers are about to buy, for example.

To push into this emergent space, Viralheat recently launched its “Human Intent” product into private beta, which giving businesses the ability to identify customers online that are on the verge of a purchasing decision — in realtime. As part of this Viralheat integrates with Salesforce, using OAuth 2.0 to exports your leads into your sale organization’s pipeline, as well as ease of export and simple employee training.

Viralheat also boasts coverage of Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook Fan pages, YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, blogs, and more, in addition to enterprise grade features like dynamic alerting, geo-location to restrict your profiles by location, and an API to embed social media intelligence into applications.

Since its launch in 2009, Viralheat has grown to over 1,300 customers from 61 countries worldwide. You can read our initial coverage of the startup here.