Muck Rack, the journalist database, raises $180M in its first exterior funding • TechCrunch

For any journalist who has ever googled their identify, there’s a good likelihood that one of many hits can be for Muck Rack, a database that trawls social media, on-line publications, and different expanses of the web to compile lists of individuals, what they cowl and the place, a software utilized by public relations execs, entrepreneurs, and others who wish to discover and join with them. At the moment, Muck Rack is making one other type of connection, with buyers: it’s raised $180 million in what it’s describing as its first exterior funding, having been bootstrapped since being based again in 2009.

The cash is coming from a single, big-name investor, Susquehanna Progress Fairness, which is taking a minority stake within the firm consequently. Founders Gregory Galant (the CEO) and Lee Semel (the CTO) will proceed to regulate the corporate submit the deal.

The corporate, based mostly out of Miami, additionally gives a variety of different instruments for the media skilled — together with media monitoring, reporting and analytics and collaboration and pitching instruments that it launched in 2011, after working for 2 years solely as a journalist database — and as such is extra typically a part of the world of enterprise intelligence, particularly within the media class, and as such competes with the likes of Cision, Meltwater, Brandwatch and maybe to some extent extra focused companies like TechMeme. All of those face an fascinating crossroads by way of what they do.

On the one hand, the face of “media” and who and what will get consideration has modified drastically within the final decade: numerous conventional publications (shops) have disappeared or morphed to maintain up with the occasions. The occasions, in the meantime, have launched a brand new layer of communication within the type of social media, which sits alongside, or typically above, that of publications in the case of mass communication and the way individuals be taught information, or about new merchandise, or no matter it’s that’s being broadcast.

Social media has a viral factor to it that’s utterly totally different from conventional media, and people creating content material on there are totally different, too. Typically, they’re nonetheless journalists. Typically, they aren’t.

The large query for a corporation like Muck Rack — or its opponents for that matter — is how they may evolve with the occasions to replicate that mass communications panorama. The secondary query is what the worth is in what it does as we speak.

At the least one reply is coming within the type of as we speak’s information and this very hefty funding spherical. Touchdown in a interval the place VCs have been tightening their purse strings, it speaks to how strongly Muck Rack has carried out till now and the arrogance buyers have in it sustaining that forward.

“We’re thrilled to associate with SGE to help our speedy progress and proceed to outline the position of PRM within the SaaS ecosystem,” stated Gregory Galant, co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack, in an announcement. “This funding is an indicator of the energy of our enterprise and Muck Rack’s vivid future as we drive towards our mission to allow organizations to construct belief, inform their tales and reveal the distinctive worth of earned media.”

The corporate says that revenues grew 75% in 2021, and between 2018 and 2021, it grew gross sales 300%, spectacular numbers for a corporation that’s greater than a decade outdated, and has been bootstrapped. Clients who’re utilizing Muck Rack’s database embody Google, Worldwide Rescue Committee, Pfizer, Golin, Zapier and Duolingo, it stated.

The Covid-19 impact appears to have been a double one: not solely did it drive extra would-be Muck Rack prospects to seeing out extra cloud-based instruments to do their jobs extra effectively, nevertheless it impacted how Muck Rack itself is run. Workers numbers 200 and it’s been working as a “distributed” enterprise since 2021, the corporate stated. (Muck Rack was based in NYC, however the dateline on its announcement is Miami, talking to how the corporate itself has taken the second to hunt out areas which are extra amenable to work life steadiness, one thing that grew to become an enormous theme in the course of the pandemic.)

And it has traction with its targets: greater than 10,000 journalists requested to be added to the database when it first launched, though from my private expertise plainly it’s additionally fairly adept at including journalists with out them asking to be added.

“Each PR skilled needs to be utilizing Muck Rack,” stated Josh Elser, managing director at SGE, in an announcement “The Firm has established itself as one of the progressive software program platforms to satisfy the shifting calls for of the communications trade. We imagine there may be super alternative for Muck Rack to be the dominant world PR platform, and we look ahead to working carefully with Greg, Lee and their group to help this subsequent part of firm enlargement.” Elser and Scott Feldman of SGE can be becoming a member of the board.