Last December, Chicago startup Sprout Social raised more than $40 million in new funding. Now, it's adding more than 100 new employees as it becomes the go-to tool to help brands manage their social media.
Sprout expects to add 110 new workers to its sales and customer success teams before the end of April, according to Sprout's Chief People Officer Maureen Calabrese. The new additions will increase Sprout's sales team by more than 50 percent in just the first four months of the year.
Sprout now has more than 500 total employees across its three offices in Chicago, Seattle and Dublin. The startup has around 400 in its Chicago headquarters.
Calabrese said Sprout expects to be around 650 total employees by the end of the year.
"From a recruiting perspective, Chicago is such a thriving market," Calabrese said. "When you look across the whole upper Midwest, there's great university systems."
"As the tech community builds...it continues to attract people back to the market," she added. "There's a lot of people we see coming back [to Chicago] from the coasts."
Sprout's last round of funding valued the business at $800 million, just shy of "unicorn" status. But it did officially move the startup into another exclusive category, as it's now one of just a handful of Chicago startups to raise more than $100 million in total outside funding. Other startups that have hit the milestone in recent years include Uptake, Tempus, G2 Crowd and Raise.
Sprout's backers include Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Lightbank and Future Fund, an investment fund led by the Australian Government.
Founded in 2010, Sprout has grown its customer base to more than 25,000 brands, including well-known companies like Adidas, Microsoft, NBCUniversal and Grubhub, which use Sprout to manage their social media accounts and interact with their customers and followers.
