Thismoment raises $17.6M in Series D funding

Thismoment helps brands find and gain the rights to user generated content on social media

(Updated with comment from Thismoment)

Youtube and social media have created a whole generation of content generators. We create videos, we photoshop and manipulate images, even create our own soundtracks and remixes of our favorite songs. We are generating more content than ever before, and brands want to get their hands on it.

Content marketing platform Thismoment, which helps major companies negotiate the rights to user generated content, has now raised $17.6 million in Series D funding, it was announced on Wednesday. The round was led by Sierra Ventures, Trident Capital and UMC. 

The company had previously raised $34.4 million in funding, most recently a $22 million round in 2012. Thismoment has now raised a total of $54 million in venture capital funding.

Founded in 2008, the San Francisco-based Thismoment works with some of the world’s largest brands to help them gain the rights to republish user generated content. Thismoment Content Cloud automates the process of monitoring, moderating and clearing rights to UGC across multiple platforms and media types.

"Consumers are demanding more and more content, and in many cases large organizations have trouble creating the amount of content required for their marketing, sales and HR needs. To satiate this need for content, organizations are turning to the vast repository of user-generated content,"  Vince Broady, CEO of Thismoment, explained to me.

"Thismoment is hyper focused on helping them to manage this content efficiently through monitoring, searching, moderating and clearing usage rights, curating and distributing across multiple platforms and media types."

Here’s how it works: with Content Cloud, Thismoment customers can find content on the user interface from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, among other platforms. Content can be searched by status, type, origin or metadata. There is also a content automation engine that is provided by Thismoment.

If they find content they want they can add it to their library, and they can clear the rights with Thismoment’s UGC curation tool.

Once they have the rights to the content, the brand can mix a playlist for customers, and then share them using a developer platform. The platform integrates with marketing tools that include Adobe Marketing Cloud, Salesforce1, and Sprinklr.

So, for example, Sephora’s Beauty Board, a Pinterest-meets-Instagram site, allows customers to share selfies of their favorite beauty looks and then tag the products they used to create them. People visiting Beauty Board can click and buy products used in the selfies directly from Sephora’s web site.

Part of the reason that brands want to gain access to UGC is that it helps them to build better, and more personal, relationships with their customers. What could make someone feel more connected to a brand than having something they created used in a commercial or on the company’s website?

While there are many players in the UGC content space, including Percolate and RebelMouse, Broady says that Thismoment separates itself by being "uniquely positioned as an end-to-end UGC solution built for the Global 1000."

"The Thismoment platform offers an end-to-end UGC solution for large enterprises. It not only enables them to fully exploit the power of UGC, but also fully integrates with their existing IT systems," he said. "We believe our approach is unique, which is why we can claim some of the world’s biggest brands as customers."

Thismoment has been working with over 150 of the Fortune 500 brands since 2007. In all, more than 150 top brands and agencies use Thismoment, including Levis, Intuit, Salesforce, EA, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Microsoft, Mastercard, Nestle, Pepsi, Expedia, Oracle, AT&T and the United States Post Office.

Broady says that the new funding will be used for product development, such as integrating more sources, integrating with more enterprise systems, and to support business growth across varied use cases and verticals and expanded geographies..

(Image source: thismoment.com)