Kontagent raises $12M to expand social analytics into mobile

Kontagent said today it has raised $12 million in a second round of funding to expand its social analytics business into mobile markets.

Kontagent is one of the “big data” companies that takes an enormous amount of data generated by social games and interprets that data into useful information for social app makers. Those customers can use the data to tweak their applications so they engage users more deeply and make more money from them.

Jeff Tseng, chief executive of San Francisco-based Kontagent, said the company will use new funds to solidify its position as a leading analytics solution for social applications — such as analytics for games on Facebook. It will also use the money for research into product innovations and for an expansion into the mobile and web markets.

The money comes from Battery Ventures, Maverick Capital and Altos Ventures. Roger Lee, general partner at Battery Ventures, will join Kontagent’s board.

Kontagent will now invest more heavily in products and features that provide sophisticated data mining and predictive analytics, which help customers make better real-time business decisions.

Kontagent was founded in 2007. Its customers include Electronic Arts, Warner Bros., PopCap Games (now owned by EA), Ubisoft, Gaia, A&E and others. Kontagent tracks more than 1,000 social apps with 150 million monthly active users. It processes about 15,000 messages every second. Kontagent has 65 employees.

Rivals include Mixpanel and Kissmetrics, but Tseng says Kontagent’s biggest competition is in-house metrics systems.