UPDATED 20:45 EDT / MARCH 30 2017

CLOUD

Chute raises $4.1M for its user-generated content platform for the enterprise

San Francisco-based visual marketing company Chute Corp. announced today that it has closed a $4.1 million Series B funding round led by Foundry Group, Salesforce Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners.

This brings Chute’s total venture funding to date to more than $16 million. Founded in 2012, Chute specializes in sourcing user-generated content for brands through a combination of text search, visual recognition and geolocation.

The goal behind Chute’s platform is to make it easy for brands to let their customers do their advertising for them by grabbing images and other media from social media, blogs, forums and so on. Chute also navigates the complicated world of usage rights for this content through its Chute Rights service.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen authentic marketing, such as user-generated content and influencers, explode in the marketing world,” Ryan McIntryre, Foundry Group managing director and co-founder, said in a statement. “Chute predicted this shift year in advance and we are thrilled to see that they’re continuing to innovate and grow.”

Chute recently added an integration with Salesforce Community Cloud, and the company said it will be adding new functionality to its Salesforce app in the near future, including new media management, social content and user-generated content features. With its new funding, Chute also plans to scale up its global operations and develop new products.

Chute Chief Executive Ranvir Gujral said the company is also looking to make new enterprise partnerships.

“I do believe that others in the space were more interested in partnering with us,” Gujral told VentureBeat. “We have always focused on the enterprise, but we have a small sales and marketing team. By leveraging our integrations with the incumbent providers, we believe we have a more seamless and cost-effective path to addressing the enterprise. And in the case of Salesforce, once they get in with a customer, they obviously want to pursue a ‘multi-cloud’ strategy and sell them other products.”

Photo: Chute

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