Respondology, the provider of a social media comment moderation and intelligence platform, announced Wednesday it has raised $5 million in new funding.

Investors for the A-1 Series round included Iron Gate Capital, SJF Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Boulder Heavy Industries and RLB Holdings. The round builds on a $11 million Series A raised by the company in 2023 from the same group of investors.

Respondology’s platform provides instant social media comment moderation for enterprise bands and businesses to protect them from spam, bots and toxic messages. It does this by combining key phrases, business rules, generative artificial intelligence and skilled human moderators to remove problematic comments in seconds.

“Social media comment streams have become the No. 1 communication channel between brands and their consumers, prospects, followers and fans,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Erik Swain. “But with platforms stepping back from enforcement, brands are left to fend for themselves – and they’re leaning in more than ever. “

Social media companies such as Meta Platform Inc. announced significant changes to its content moderation policies earlier this year. The change put additional burden on users to discover and report violations on users and enforces greater degrees of confidence needed before action is taken. X Corp., formerly Twitter, cut most of its content moderation and safety staff across 2022 and 2023.

According to a report from global business intelligence platform Statista, social media advertising spending is projected to reach $276 billion in 2025 and is estimated to reach $406 billion by 2029. People on social media favor authentic content and extra noise generated by spam, bots or offensive comments could turn potential consumers away.

Respondology said that from its internal metrics, its customers have seen increased performance in return on ad spend using social media. On the short form video media site TikTok customers saw a more than 17% increase, and across Meta’s platform, they received a boost of more than 7% thanks to instant moderation.

In addition to content moderation, the company also provides a second product called Discover, which uses AI to analyze and summarize conversations happening within social media comments in real time. It provides deep topic research and trend monitoring to allow brands to understand what’s happening across social media including within their niche or among the competition.

For example, it could be used to evaluate influencers or partners based on audience sentiment, track emerging trends across the industry, and benchmark brand visibility and engagement compared to competitors. It could also be used to analyze competitors to see how well they’re doing with their audience and identify marketing opportunities.

“Marketers not only want and need moderation but also to learn from those social conversations and soon, engage in a personalized way at scale with their audience,” added Swain.

The company claims more than 450 brands across sports, entertainment, consumer goods and marketing agencies. According to provided metrics, it serves more than 2 billion followers and moderates more than 365 million comments globally.

Respondology said with the new investment, it intends to enhance its existing AI-driven moderation and discovery capabilities while supporting the launch of a third unnamed flagship product.

Image: Respondology