Vancouver-based Brightkit has launched today, announcing that it raised a seed round led by angel investors Geoff Entress and Matthew Moore. The startup originally came out of Invoke Labs (the creators of Hootsuite), and was originally called “Memelabs”.
In less than one year the startup has raised funding, launched in the Hootsuite app directory and convinced some big name brands to use the service. Brightkit is a social marketing platform that provides brands and agencies the opportunity to launch innovative, forward thinking social marketing campaigns that live on Facebook and websites. Brands manage these campaigns directly from their HootSuite dashboard.
“Brands are scrambling to find innovative ways to engage their online and social audiences. Brightkit solves that problem,” said CEO Richard Hungerford. “Social marketing campaigns are 30-60 percent more effective per dollar spent than traditional online advertising. We’ve designed a platform that is perfect for large brands and agencies. It’s customizable, flexible, easy to use and generates a wealth of insights for our clients.”
Brightkit has also picked up big name clients like NBC Universal, Snapple, Sprint, Tommy Bahama, SpinMedia and KFC, who use the platform.
“Social media is an incredibly important tool for many businesses,” said Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes. “Brightkit has developed a platform that allows brands to interact with their social audiences in a unique and engaging way. With the integration into HootSuite, clients can manage their Brighkit social marketing campaigns through the app.”
Brightkit helps brands develop enagagement tools, like user-generated campaigns, influencing users to submit videos, photos, and text to a centralized platform. Other engagement tools that the company specializes in is branded caption contests, social sweepstakes that collect user data, “head-to-head” campaigns that act as A/B tests for new products, and couponing. Users can build their own fully customizable campaigns quickly and easy and generate insights and analytics, both for web and mobile.
The startup has also been growing at a fairly quick pace. Over the past year it tripled its employee count and anticipates doubling in size over the next year.
“Brightkit is another great example of the evolving and rapidly growing Vancouver tech scene,” said Invoke Labs’ Keith Ippel. “Brightkit is on an incredible growth trajectory and it’s exciting to see another tech startup launch out of Invoke.”
Some other interesting news to come out of Vancouver is that Chris Alexander, Canada’s Minister of Citizenship and Immigration will visit GrowLab tomorrow to meet with Vancouver tech leaders and discuss matters relating to Startup Visa Canada. Last week we sat down with MP Tony Clement to discuss the currently slow process that hasn’t yet seen any startup visas issued.