Social Media Customer Care Startup, Brand Embassy, Gets $1M Seed To Power A Global Push

UK-based Brand Embassy, a provider of social-media based customer care services to help businesses manage communications with customers via channels such as Facebook and Twitter, has closed a $1 million seed round from two new funds, Rockaway Capital and Spread Capital.

The new investment is an exit deal for two early Brand Embassy investors: StartupYard, a CEE technology accelerator where Brand Embassy was incubated, and Michal Nydrle, owner of Kindred Group.

We understand that StartupYard saw a 20x return, which it will use to fund a future cohort. If we presume — and it’s only a presumption — that the Prague-based accelerator invested €10k in Brand Embassy to incubate the startup, that’s a €200k return (~$274,000). We understand this was separate the new $1m raise.

Brand Embassy’s two new investors said they are anticipating global growth thanks to the growing importance of social networks as a customer care channel. Its software-as-a-service offering gives users the ability to manage multiple social media sources, and generate various reports such as engagement and workflow reports. The company’s top tier package also integrates with Salesforce.com.

“I see Brand Embassy as a global project which already has a strong position and I am anticipating substantial growth as this whole segment of caring for customers via social networks grows in importance,” said Jakub Havrlant in a statement. Havrlant, an internet entrepreneur and investor, put money into Brand Embassy through his Rockaway Capital seed investment fund.

Brand Embassy, which was founded back in 2011 but launched its service in 2012, said it will use the funding to expand the feature set of its product and open six new offices worldwide, as it looks to expand a cumulative customer base of more than 50 large international clients. Its client roster has included names like Vodafone, Telefonica O2, T-Mobile, AVG, Diageo, Johnson & Johnson, KIA, ING, Prezi and GE Money.

“We’ve opened offices in the USA, Dubai, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, and Latin America to complement our offices in Prague and London,” said CEO Vit Horky in a statement. “The partnership with new investors will help us expand our sales and product development team and launch new unique product features.”

We’ve previously covered Brand Embassy’s acquisition of semantic search startup Beepl, back in 2012 — a startup co-founded by TechCrunch writer Steve O’Hear (who was not a TC writer while working for Beepl).

Brand Embassy integrated Beepl’s technology into its SaaS platform to power features such as automated tagging, assigning and behavioral learning based on the meaning of customer comments from across the entire social web.

TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear contributed to this report