After securing $2.5m in debt funding, the company has its eye on an ‘ambitious’ growth plan.
Irish-founded news analytics platform NewsWhip has revealed plans to significantly expand its product and engineering team. The company is currently looking to fill eight roles by early next year as part of a major effort to ramp up growth.
It currently has 28 employees on its engineering team, up from 22 at the start of the year. According to NewsWhip’s chief product officer, Dervilla Mullan, it plans to hire eight people in January and a further 15 or 20 by June 2022.
“It’s effectively a doubling of the team in about an 18-month timeframe,” Mullan told SiliconRepublic.com. Many of the roles will be remote as NewsWhip is currently in the process of “evolving” into a remote-first company.
“We’re very flexible now on location,” she said, adding that most of the company’s engineering team is based at its Irish headquarters in Dublin.
The growth plans come after NewsWhip secured $2.5m in debt funding, most of which will be spent on its expansion and improving its analytics and data science capabilities. Engineers and data scientists joining the company can expect to work on what Mullan called an “ambitious product roadmap”, for which it needs extra people.
The company’s financing comes courtesy of Element Finance, a US firm that provides debt funding to software-as-a-service companies. It counts Irish tech entrepreneur and CloudVertical founder Ed Byrne as a general partner. The firm’s funding of NewsWhip is non-dilutive, so it will not have a stake in the company.
NewsWhip was founded a decade ago, developing technology that tracks the performance of news stories across the internet. Its clients include major news brands Condé Nast, the Washington Post and Associated Press, as well as NGOs and corporate brands like McDonald’s, Pepsi and Ford.
Co-founder Paul Quigley told the Irish Times that pursuing corporate brands is an area the company is interested in growing. “Brands have been turning to us more and more to quantify and understand all the stories and narratives that they want to watch about themselves, and about political and social issues.
“So just like newsrooms use us to know which stories are going to be important today, now brands like McDonald’s and Ford are using us for that, and that’s been our biggest growth area this year,” he told the publication, adding that revenue from brands had grown 60pc over the past year.
Mullan told SiliconRepublic.com that the company’s real-time tracking tools are what distinguishes it from most other analytics companies. It aims to help brands to manage their own reputations as they are formed on social media networks.
NewsWhip has corporate partnerships with companies like Meta, formerly known as Facebook, which enable it to “get signals from them at a frequency and granularity that nobody else in the market has,” Mullan said.
The company, which has offices in Dublin and New York and a growing client base in London, has also recently hired a new VP of engineering, Paul Dolan. He comes from a cybersecurity background and previously worked for Vectra.
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