Klout Gains More Clout With $30 Million

The Klout influence ranking site tells you if you're as cool as you think you are.

Image: Klout

Klout, the occasionally battered social ranking company, proves it still has believers where it counts as it raises an estimated $30 million in series C funding, according to a report Tuesday in TechCrunch.

“This is going mainstream way earlier than I expected,” said John Frankel, investing partner of ff Venture Capital. “The reason we invested was that we believed by mid-decade people would care about their online reputations and would need tools to manage it.”

Klout helps manage online reputations by extrapolating data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks to provide a score that gauges the social influence of more than 100 million public profiles—the higher the score, the greater the influence.

Klout's usefulness has been doubted by critics such as Dave Marsey, of Boston ad agency Digitas, who credited the company with "inventing" the space, but in a report by the Business Journals doubted whether the “GPA” of social influence was accurate.

Joe Fernandez (Klout score: 66/100), who is not only an investor in the company but the CEO, told TechCrunch that API requests have increased from 100 million in January 2011 to 10 billion in December 2011—a strong indicator of demand for Klout’s social rating system since API is the code organizations use to compare the company’s data with data from their own resources.

Klout launched in 2009, and in April of 2010 raised $1.5 million, followed by $8.5 million in January 2011, bringing the total to $40 million. Other funders include Chi-Hua Chien and Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield’s Allen Morgan, IVP, Venrock, and Greycroft.