Involver nabs $8M, claims 100K customers for social marketing platform

Involver, a startup that helps brands manage social media channels, announced today that it has over 100,000 customers and just closed $8 million in mezzanine funding.

Involver helps clients including Microsoft, Audi, Sony/RCA Records and the White House manage their online communities on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It gives clients a variety of tools to optimize the way consumers see and interact with their brands, including offering coupons, conducting polls and creating customized “landing pages” for visitors. Other tools enable sharing of photos, tweets and whitepapers across a range of social media sites.

San Francisco-based Involver said it will use the new funding to further expand its platform and help it focus on growth in coming quarters.

Involver was founded in 2007 and has raised $10 million to date. The latest round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) and included existing stakeholders Western Technology Investment and Cervin Ventures.

Two Bessemer execs, Byron Deeter and Philippe Botteri, will now join Involver’s board as part of the deal.

BVP has been an active investment firm since 1911 and has been quick to pounce on promising looking tech startups over recent years, including taking stakes in LinkedIn, Skype, Yodle, VeriSign and Yelp.

Its new partnership with Involver could be a sign that the firm is eyeing an IPO sometime in the near future: BVP is an old hand at taking companies public, having debuted over 100 companies in Canada, India, London and the United States.

“In the past few years we’ve watched the social Web — including sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — turn into an incredibly compelling marketing medium for businesses,” said Bessemer’s Byron Deeter. “There are few other venues where brands can interact so directly, in a one-on-one fashion, with their customers — and find new ones.”