Silicon Roundabout's PeerIndex secures £1.9m funding

London-based PeerIndex will use the $3m (£1.9m) funding it has secured to offer brands new ways of understanding how to become online trendsetters.

The social media services business, headquartered in east London’s Silicon Roundabout, secured the investment through a Series A funding round. PeerIndex measures interactions across the web and allows brands to reach social media ‘influencers’.

Venture capital investors and angels are among the groups to back PeerIndex. Existing investor Anthemis Group and Antrak Capital have invested in the company, while former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, former Activebuddy CEO Stephen Klein and Restoration Partners chairman Ken Olisa have contributed in an angel capacity.

PeerIndex marketing manager Micah Berek said: “We’re going to use the cash to build more partnerships with brands for our influencer marketing offering, to drive growth in our mass-market PeerPerks service and to further develop our influence ranking algorithm.

“All of this means that we’re going to be able to offer users powerful new ways to understand their power to become online trendsetters and help brands find a better pool of influencers on a global basis for their influence marketing campaigns.”

Berek said being based among other exciting start-ups in London’s Tech City had been an asset for the company, but stressed the importance of looking beyond the local market.

“I think being in touch with local start-ups and other industries has been invaluable, but at the end of the day with online offerings, it’s crucial to find traction throughout the world and we have been fortunate to receive a lot of international attention,” he said.

Among the current brands PeerIndex is working with are two London-based online retailers – exclusive fashion online popup portal Lookk.com and members only luxury lifestyle retailer Achica.

Berek said: “These campaigns are currently live and running very well. We did a campaign for the O2 Arena in December 2011 that reached over two million users and saw more than 500 tweets from influencers, while 41 per cent of tweets were re-tweeted. Campaign response rates showed an 84 per cent positive sentiment.”

O2, Penguin Books and Atlantic Records are among the other businesses to use PeerIndex’s scoring system to measure the impact their social media campaigns are having, so it seems Silicon Roundabout could have another success story on its hands.