Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Bluefin Labs brings in $12M in Series B round

By Rodney H. Brown

Cambridge startup Bluefin Labs Inc. has raised $12 million in a Series B funding from lead investor Time Warner Investments, the venture financing arm of Time Warner.

Bluefin reported in a release this morning that Time Warner Investments senior vice president and group managing director Rachel Lam will join the company’s board of directors. The new money will be used to speed up the expansion of Bluefin’s sales and client services teams, as well as further research into its social networking-based TV analytics platform.

Also participating in the financing is new investor SoftBank Capital and returning backers Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures, the company said. In October 2010 Bluefin raised $6 million in its Series A round. Counting a $1.2 million seed round in May 2009, the company has raised more than $19 million to date from institutional backers.

Bluefin Signals is the company’s flagship product and it uses social media like Facebook and Twitter to gather data about responses to television programming. Bluefin was co-founded by Frank Moss, the former director of the MIT Media Lab from 2006-2011 and current professor of the practice at the Media Lab; Brian Bedol, managing partner of Bedrock Venture Partners; CTO Michael Fleischman, also of the Media Lab; and CEO Deb Roy, an MIT professor currently on leave from the school, according to the Bluefin website.

Among Bluefin’s list of clients are CBS, Fox, Discovery Communications, MediaCom, MTV Networks, Starcom MediaVest Group and others.

Founded as Bluefin Lab, the company changed its name by adding the “s” in September 2010. In an October 2009 article, the company also identified venture capital firm Kepha Partners of Waltham as a backer. Bluefin Labs also listed as a co-founder at the time serial entrepreneur Andy Palmer, although he is not listed on the website.