After getting access to the Twitter firehose, social media data startup Dataminr lands $13m

Real-time social media data firm Dataminr today announced that it has raised $13 million in Series B funding. The company says the round was led by existing Series A investors from the financial industry but also includes new backing from GSV Capital, Deep Fork Capital, Viceroy Capital, Wharton Equity Partners and others.

Dataminr, which primarily serves the financial and government sectors, earlier this year made headlines when it was granted coveted access to Twitter’s data firehose.

Twitter argues that most applications don’t even require Firehose access, and only a select few companies have received it in the past, including DataSift and Gnip.

Dataminr needs that kind of access because it offers an analytics engine that basically turns social media streams into actionable insights for its clients, providing one of the earliest warning systems for market-relevant information, events and emerging trends.

Its engine processes all public tweets, detecting linguistic and propagation patterns across over the 400 million messages that are shared daily on Twitter.

Dataminr clients receive actionable signals based on its processing in real-time, often in advance of mainstream news, the startup asserts. To illustrate this: Dataminr claims to have detected Osama bin Laden’s death way before global news media picked up on the story.

Based in New York City, Dataminr was founded in 2009.

Twitter’s Head of Platform, Ryan Sarver, at one point told us that Dataminr was one of his favorite innovations within the Twitter developer community.

(Top image credit: VIKTOR DRACHEV for AFP / Getty Images)