Google Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the search engine Google, has led a $1.2m Series A into TrueLens, a developer of social data analytics for brands. There was also involvement from Charles River Ventures, Common Angels, 500 Startups, and Boston Seed, and from angel investors, including HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah, Tremor SVP Waikit Lau, InfoChimps co-founder Nick Ducoff, and John Simon, former board member at BzzAgent and m-Qube.
Co-founder and chief executive Roy Rodenstein, previously of going.com which was acquired by AOL in 2009, said: “Today data drives decisions across all industries, we are creating a competitive advantage for leading brands by applying advanced linguistic and machine learning technologies to derive a powerful new data set based on customers’ social expressions.”
Google Ventures invests around $100m a year into startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care.