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Palantir buys Poptip, a startup that helps brands make sense of tweets

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A social media startup and a big data company that works with government agencies might seem like an odd couple, but hey, Palantir went and bought Poptip.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Poptip will join Palantir on Friday, according to a blog post today from Poptip founder and chief executive Kelsey Falter.

Not long ago, Poptip graduated from Techstars NYC, with plans to help companies improve their communication with consumers on Twitter. “With Poptip, feedback has finally come of age,” Falter said at the time.

Poptip has grown since then. It has rolled out tools for running surveys that take input from Facebook and Twitter posts as well as a dashboards and alerts for the terms people mention in tweets. Now it works with nearly 60 brands, including Budweiser, L’Oreal, and Spotify.

A tool for creating polls might seem simple, but actually, the acquisition could give Palantir some extra help in the domain of natural-language processing, which can bolster all sorts of applications.

That area has stood out to investors recently, with funding for startups like AlchemyAPI, Clarabridge, Idibon, Narrative Science, and Synapsify.

And indeed the blog post from Falter suggests that Poptip will expand its scope once well-funded Palantir has subsumed it:

At Palantir, we will continue to build innovative products for data analysis in the commercial sector that will be transformational for industries. Over the past two years Poptip has developed deep relationships with respected brands and has gained invaluable insight into their needs. We’re thrilled to be able to continue building products to help these companies as part of the growing Palantir team here in New York.

Poptip started in 2012 and was based in New York. Investors include Lerer Ventures, RSE Ventures, SoftBank Capital, and David Tisch.

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(from Web Site) Palantir Technologies is working to radically change how groups analyze information. Palantir was founded in 2004 by a handful of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists. The company has doubled in size every... read more »

We have some exciting news today so I’ll cut to the chase – Poptip will be joining Palantir beginning August 1.

Two years ago I made the decision to leave my senior year of undergrad at Notre Dame and found Poptip. I remember signing our first customer 2 months later and am now proud to say that Poptip works with nearly 60 brands – many of whom are among the Fortune 500 or some of the most prominent media brands in the world. The Poptip team has worked tirelessly to develop innovative technology that helps commercial companies process unstructured conversation data. And we’ve been fortunate enough to help quantify the voices of hundreds of millions of people through our products. Our work at Poptip was our first foray in real time data analysis. But we know we still have so much room to innovate and grow, and Palantir gives us the resources to do just that.

The ethos of our companies are highly aligned. Just as Poptip set out to transform the ways that companies use social conversation data, so too Palantir started with the intention to transform the way organizations use all of their data. Palantir’s work spans government, commercial, and non-profit. The company also prides itself on its strong work ethic that fuels its long term vision– just as we do here at Poptip.

At Palantir, we will continue to build innovative products for data analysis in the commercial sector that will be transformational for industries. Over the past two years Poptip has developed deep relationships with respected brands and has gained invaluable insight into their needs. We’re thrilled to be able to continue building products to help these companies as part of the growing Palantir team here in New York.

I’d also like to extend a truly heartfelt thank you to my team who is a second family, to our early customers especially our first believer Darren Rovell of ESPN, all of our investors and angels including Lerer Ventures, RSE Ventures, and David Tisch, our advisors including Emil Michael and Jared Hecht, and to the team at Brew Media Relations. Thank you all so much for the support; we are excited for the road ahead and what the team has left to accomplish.

Looking forward, 

The relationship between brands and their customers is evolving, forcing brands to rethink how they understand their customers and where they gather consumer insights. Today, understanding consumer opinions of products and issues means breaking down the visual and textual conversation happening on social networks.

With 82% of women between the ages of 18 and 34 posting about new products and services on social media, and 68% of social media users between the ages of 18 and 34 making purchase decisions after seeing a friend’s post, it is critical that brands understand social consumers.

That’s why today, we are excited to announce the launch of Zipline for Instagram.

Zipline for Instagram breaks down tagging trends on Instagram, allowing brands to understand how consumers discover and relate to their product category.

Hashtags on Instagram are the gateway to organic discovery and are the only method for discovering topic-based content on Instagram. Zipline helps brands better align themselves with consumers by tagging their content in a more authentic way, giving brands a customer-centric approach to identifying how consumers categorize and discover their products.

With over 60,000 comments per minute and over 55 million photos being uploaded each day, Instagram has seen the fastest growth, most engagement, and highest conversion from browser to shopper. The Instagram integration builds on our Zipline for Twitter product, a conversation analysis product that instantly identifies common phrases and opinions from the crowd about any topic on Twitter.

The L’Oréal portfolio of brands is the first to be piloting Zipline for Instagram.

Our founder and CEO was the recipient of the L’Oréal Women in Digital award in 2013, and has been working with Rachel Weiss, VP of Digital Strategy and Innovation at L’Oréal, on the L’Oréal brands’ approach to social commerce on Twitter and Instagram. By utilizing Zipline for Instagram, L’Oréal brands can ensure their content is discoverable when Instagram users want to explore beauty on Instagram.

“The question for us is, how can we continuously improve the customer’s experience when interacting with our products?” Rachel said. “As customers interact with social networks like Instagram, you learn information like how our customers expect to discover beauty, how they prefer to shop, and what beauty trends they care about right now. The whole point for us with our social strategy is you can touch a customer at any point within the customer’s decision journey, and we want to ensure our customers can easily discover a look from one of our brands when they are browsing beauty on Instagram.”

How does it work?

Instagram Ziplines are “opened” through the Poptip platform by entering a hashtag or set of hashtags for a product category, brand, or topic that you want to understand. Zipline then analyzes the text of all photos and videos that contain those hashtags. Relevant photos and videos, along with other commonly mentioned hashtags, will be returned on your Zipline dashboard in real time.

For example, if Essie nail polish opens a Zipline on #Essie and #manicure, Zipline will pull in all photos and videos that are being posted with that hashtag, while also identifying that people are commonly using #glitter, #nailart, and #tutorial in that conversation as well.

Understand dynamic tagging trends for organic discovery

Poptip highlights real time trends around tagging. By contrasting these trends with trends in how a brand is tagging their own content, Poptip enables brands to better position themselves for discoverability.

Understand what media is being posted about your brand

Brands can use Zipline for Instagram to understand how people are talking about their brand, or any topic, on Instagram -- as well as to stay on top of emerging trends. Additionally, Zipline makes Instagram embed codes immediately accessible so you can integrate Instagram photos into content in a matter of seconds.

Brands can use Zipline for Instagram to:

understand the visual conversation relevant to their brand category

see how often their brand relates to a specific topic

see what other topics their brand is associated with

see what other brands their brand is associated with

understand what hashtags to use to make content discoverable to target audiences

competitive intelligence

understanding the social consumer voice

This is what a sonic burrito looks like

Earlier today we asked a question on the BBC America Twitter account: What would you rather have right now? A Clone, A Sonic Screwdriver, or a Burrito all in honor of our Supernatural Saturday lineup of Doctor Who, Orphan Black, and The Nerdist. Most people answered Sonic, but some gave an answer we didn't anticipate...

A Sonic Burrito.

So we went out and made one for you.

Enjoy your sonic burrito.

Poptip is a service that turns Twitter accounts into polling machines.