Influencer marketing management company Grin Technologies Inc. has closed a $110 million funding round led by Lone Pine Capital of Greenwich, Connecticut.
The new money will allow Sacramento-based Grin to expand its leadership team and expand to markets in the United Kingdom and Australia, the company said.
"It's becoming more apparent than ever that the creator economy is here to stay. Where consumers used to watch TV stations, they now turn to people on social media as their trusted source for entertainment," said Brandon Brown, CEO and co-founder of Grin, in a news release. “Authenticity is critical in the creator economy, and that's why we built Grin, a SaaS platform built for creator management that is trusted by thousands of the world's leading brands.”
The new funding round brings Grin up to $145.3 million raised, according to venture capital tracking site Crunchbase. Grin, in its fall report, said it had 214 employees.
Lone Pine is a private hedge fund with $3.6 billion in assets under management.
"Lone Pine focuses on disruptive companies that are bringing game-changing solutions to their respective industries," said Kelly Granat, portfolio manager at Lone Pine Capital, in a news release. "Grin is the definitive leader in influencer marketing, well-positioned to solve some of the biggest challenges the market will face as the creator economy continues to expand and evolve."
Grin built a platform that manages the logistics, record keeping, analytics and payment for influencer marketing, which is online social-media marketing and endorsements. Brown and co-founder Brian Mechem started the company in 2014 to market social media influencer advertising, but they pivoted the company in 2017 to provide systems to manage that kind of advertising for their direct-to-consumer clients.
The sweet spot for Grin has been midlevel influencers. Rather than finding super celebrities in the social media space, Grin concentrates on “micro influencers” with 100,000 followers or fewer, which is a niche that has the highest loyalty and return on investment, company executives said in a previous interview.
Most companies that use Grin’s influencer-marketing tools already have influencers, who may be paid by the companies whose products they promote or, most often, they receive gifts from those companies.
Grin raised a $6 million round of venture capital in October 2019. The funding was led by San Francisco venture capital firm Bullpen Capital and included investors Moneta Ventures LLC of Folsom and Launch Accelerator. Grin was part of the ninth cohort of the Launch Accelerator in 2019.
