Sprinklr joins Unicorn Club with $1B+ valuation, launches “Experience Cloud”

Founded just over five years ago, enterprise social media management company Sprinklr announced it has raised $46 million in its series E round and is valued at over $1 billion.

Welcome to the unicorn club. Along with about 35 other members.

Sprinklr simultaneously announced the launch of an “Experience Cloud,” which the company calls “an offering that allows brands to create, manage, and deliver experiences across 23 social channels and brand websites.” It’s reasonable for the company to call itself a platform, because it provides a continuum of social services to its enterprise customers.

Sprinklr bought Pluck just last month, and in conjunction with its acquisition of Branderati, provides capabilities to manage social media components on the owned web site with features like social signon, commenting, and gamification.

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The company has also bought Dachis Group and TBG Digital for analytics and social advertising capabilities.

Although the company is exclusively focused on social media, it is shifting its positioning to customer experience management. For most brands, social media began as an experimental silo. Today, however, it’s an important part of a broader, multi-channel engagement strategy.

These past few years have seen Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle acquire various social media solutions and subsume them into their cross-channel Marketing Clouds.

Sprinklr recognizes these larger players as its biggest competition. And in order to remain relevant and take on the larger vendors, Sprinklr will have to be more than just a social tool.

In the company’s press release, CEO Ragy Thomas says, “Global businesses are expanding from channel-centric and function-centric thinking in response to the increasingly connected customer. Neither point solutions nor disconnected cloud services will allow them to consistently deliver valuable customer experiences at every social touch point.”

Other than calling itself an Experience Platform, one step the company took in that direction is a new integration with SAP Hybris, which powers its new commerce component.

Expect to see Sprinklr announce further partnerships and integrations to leverage social customer data across the enterprise – beyond the social silo.

In total, Sprinklr has now raised $123.5 million in venture funding. Existing investors Battery Ventures, Intel Capital, and Iconiq Capital led the round. Sprinklr competitor Hootsuite raised $165 million in its last round alone, in late 2013, although Hootsuite did not disclose the valuation at the time.