Social media is big business, and not just for the social networks behind it like Facebook and Twitter. Sprinklr Inc’s “social experience” tools are used by hundreds of clients to manage their social media presence and ad campaigns, and now Sprinklr has become the latest tech startup to be valued at over $1 billion.

Today, the New York-based company announced its new valuation as well as an additional $46 million in funding, bringing Sprinklr’s total funding to date up to $123.5 million. At the same time, Sprinklr is launching its new Experience Cloud platform, which offers “a complete, integrated, and collaborative technology infrastructure that connects all of a brand’s social touch points.”

“With Experience Cloud, brands can map the journey of their customers, starting at their first engagement and continuing all the way through the purchase cycle,” Sprinklr’s CEO Ragy Thomas wrote. “This allows brands to truly understand what it means to be “social-to-scale” and measure the ROI of their efforts.”

“An outdated piece of software delivered via the cloud is still an outdated piece of software”

According to Thomas, Experience Cloud allows brands to monitor and guide potential customers at multiple points along their buying process, even before they ever make contact with the business.

“The problem is that brands try to deliver cohesive experiences with tools that are inherently fragmented and not customer-centric, and it’s just not working,” Thomas wrote. “Let’s be honest: an outdated piece of software delivered via the cloud is still an outdated piece of software.”

Thomas stresses that Experience Cloud is customer-centric, saying that it will allow brands to “reimagine their relationships with their customers.” He noted that this new platform is just one more step in the company’s long term plans, and he says he “cannot wait to see what the next five years bring.”

Sprinklr’s new valuation makes the company the latest of the so-called “unicorn” startups, companies who achieved the rare status of being valued at over $1 billion. According a list by Fortune, there are less than a hundred unicorns out of the thousands upon thousands of startups in the world, but more and more are reaching that status each year.

Image credit: Sprinklr (c)