Polish brand-analytics company Brand24 announces entry into Indonesian market. I spoke with founder Michal Sadowski and he tells me that, although the American market is their main focus, they’re expanding their focus because Indonesia is a rapidly-growing market and nobody else is doing social-media analytics in this country. As a result, Sadowski feels that the country will be an ideal location for launching a localized service.
Brand24 is a company which monitors a business’ reputation on the internet. As opposed to a company like the Czech SocialBakers, which solely monitors social-media profiles, Sadowski tells me that his company covers the whole internet. I’m told that, while Brand24 does do some social-media analytics, they include it as part of the broader internet. Brand24 wants to know what people are saying about a particular company, regardless of where they’re saying it.
In terms of funding the team behind Brand24 initially bootstrapped, but that CAM Media became the first external investor when it offered $70,000 in initial funding. Last April, business angel Andrzej Zydorowicz obtained 5% of the company for 200,000 zloty (less than 50,000 euro) and that this followed the pre-launch investment of 200,000 zloty that Brand24 obtained from CAM Media in August 2011. In the earlier case, CAM Media was able to obtain a 30% stake in the company for their money, so we can see that Brand24’s valuation increased dramatically in just 5 months.
The company counts 200 businesses as clients, including Panasonic, Intel, Air France, Heureka, and Polish venture fund SpeedUp Group. Sadowski tells me, however, that his company had essentially no contact with their clients as it is SaaS offering.
In terms of competition, Sadowski says that Brand24 basically considers Radian6 and Sysomos to be their primary rivals and that the company tries to find an advantage on price and in offering superior functionality, usability, and data-mining algorithms. Some companies charge $500 for this service, which he considers unsustainable.
Finally, we’re clearly not the first to notice what Brand24 is doing, as Sadowski says that they’ve won in the “Best Web App” at the 2013 The Next Web Poland Awards and that they won at the 2012 Aulery competition.
