Dachis Group raises $42.6M in second round

Company focused on delivering social business design to the enterprise, funded by Austin Ventures

Dachis Group, a social business consulting company, has raised $42.7 million of a planned $43.9 million round, according to an SEC filing from Monday.

Previous backer Austin Ventures returned for the second round of funding; directors listed on the form include Chris Pacitti, General Partner at Austin Ventures, and one Ronald Ulich. Dachis Group CFO April Downing is listed as an executive officer and CEO Jeffrey Dachis is listed as both an executive and director.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Dachis Group focuses on introducing social technology to large corporate enterprises. The best part about Dachis is that it is not just a company that teaches businesses how to use Facebook and Twitter, but rather works with its customers on actual ideas, under the heading of social business design, toward the goal of literally reformulating the employee-partner-client ecosystem.

Freelancer Larry Irons posted a couple great pieces on VatorNews a little over a year ago, discussing the future of social business design--both are linked at the bottom and worth reading. Here’s a quotation that he actually includes in one of his pieces, from Nick Marsh:

Many agencies that have tried to deliver on big multi-channel mega service design projects...have realised that the challenge is not so much creating the unified vision of a service, but is in figuring out how to help everyone in the organisation to think of themselves as the designer of the organisation's service working towards that vision.

That’s exactly the kind of problem Dachis Group tackles.

Current Dachis clients include Coca-Cola, ESPN, Forbes and Foursquare.

The new funding round will likely help Dachis pay for its acquisition spree in 2010, having purchased six different startups last year. Last April, Dachis acquired XPLANE, The 2.0 Adoption Council, and Hinchcliffe & Company. More recently, Dachis acquired Stuzo and Archrival in November and Powered in December. All of the companies are consulting and design firms, like Dachis Group, working on bringing Web 2.0 and social media adoption to businesses.