Scout Labs

Scout Labs, founded in 2006 by Jennifer Zeszut, emerged as a player in the social media monitoring and analytics space from its headquarters in San Francisco, California. The company secured $4 million in total funding from investors including Rally Ventures and Javelin Venture Partners.

The firm developed a web-based application designed to help businesses track and analyze conversations happening across the social media landscape. Its core function was to listen to customer discussions, providing a collaborative platform for companies to better engage with their audience. The service offered a dashboard that collected and analyzed blogs, user sentiment, photos, and general brand buzz, aiming to provide qualitative insights that could inform product development and marketing strategies. The platform was built to serve a variety of roles within a company, from customer insight and research teams to brand managers and product development groups. By employing natural language processing, the tool could score sentiment and tone, offering a deeper understanding of consumer perceptions.

After operating for several years and building a base of around 300 companies using its tool, Scout Labs was acquired by Khoros on May 7, 2010, for an estimated $22.5 to $25 million. At the time of its acquisition, the company had approximately 20 employees.

Keywords: social media monitoring, brand analytics, customer sentiment analysis, web-based analytics, consumer insights, product development feedback, online brand management, social media tracking, customer engagement platform, natural language processing, sentiment scoring, collaborative platform, Jennifer Zeszut, Khoros acquisition, Rally Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, qualitative data analysis, marketing intelligence, brand health, online conversation tracking