33Across Picks Up $13.1M To Grow Its Big Data Social Graph, No Facebook Strings Attached

Social ad targeting company 33Across, which claims to operate the world’s biggest social graph covering over 1.25 billion users globally, has raised another $13.1 million in a Series C round of financing to further expand its services in the wider web — specifically advertising territory that Facebook has yet to tackle. The funding was led by new investor Pelion Ventures, and with participation from Flybridge Capital, Greycroft Partners, First Round Capital, iNovia Capital, Panorama Capital, QED Investors, Metamorphic Ventures, and Great Oaks Ventures.

The long list of VCs in this current round is because several of them are coming in from 33Across’ acquisition of Tynt in January, explains CEO Eric Wheeler: they came on as shareholders in that sale. “They have now doubled down in a big way,” he says. The company has now raised $26 million to date.

33Across says that its client base already includes 375 Fortune 1,000 companies as well as 600,000 publishers where those companies’ ads run.

There may be some more acqusitions coming with the new round of funding, but the majority of the investment, Wheeler says, will be in technology: engineering, infrastructure and new products, he says.

While currently the company offers the ability to see how users share articles with others (using anonymized data), there will be future products that include tracking how content is used and shared on mobile devices, as well as more interactive features for users — along the lines of the “like” button that Facebook has popularized.

The attraction of 33Across for advertisers and publishers is that it is tracking and using data across their own sites, which then gets translated into data that can then be used create more relevant advertising. That might sound familiar: that’s what Facebook does, too, but as Wheeler points out, Facebook’s interest in this has so far been about how that helps with advertising on Facebook, not on the wider web.

This seems to be what has interested investors, too: “The term ‘social graph’ is more often associated with Facebook than any other technology company,” stated Chad Packard, Partner of Pelion Ventures, in a statement. “However, there is a wide-open race underway to determine who will most successfully leverage anonymous social data gleaned from billions of actions taking place across the ‘rest-of-web’.”