DataSift, a rising star in the world of ‘big data’ collection and analysis, has raised $7.2 million from existing backers GRP Partners and IA Ventures to help accelerate growth as worldwide demand for its services continues to soar.

The company, which was started in the UK but will shortly be moving its headquarters to offices in the heart of the SOMA district in San Francisco, raised $6 million in funding back in July 2011 and $1.5 million in seed funding before, so this financing round brings its total capital raised to $14.7 million.

DataSift describes its solution as a real-time and historical social data platform, but the reality is that the startup is poised to go beyond the aggregation and analysis of the billions of conversations on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and whatnot.

That’s what we learned in a conversation with DataSift founder Nick Halstead, who gleefully mentioned that the company wasn’t necessarily looking for new funding but received so many requests from top-tier venture capital firms that its existing backers decided to double down and inject more capital (at a much higher valuation) into the startup as soon as possible.

DataSift will use the proceeds of the funding round to focus on its products and increase its headcount to about 70 people by the end of this year – the company is primarily looking for data scientists. Halstead says he doesn’t rule out acquisitions of smaller firms down the line, but that it’s not the main objective.

Interestingly, Halstead says there is still strong demand for social data from social media monitoring firms, business intelligence companies and financial service providers and whatnot, but that DataSift isn’t limited to that kind of data.

In fact, Halstead says, DataSift is very data-agnostic and can be used in a variety of different ways across many industries. It recently struck a deal with NewsCred that helps its clients access not only social media channels but also clippings from articles originating from traditional news sources.

Says Rob Bailey, who recently took over the CEO role at DataSift from Halstead:

“DataSift has been flooded with interest from both customers and investors since our launch in November. We are seeing incredible demand from a wide variety of sectors of customers, including Social Media Monitoring, Business Intelligence, News and Finance.

While we were not actively looking for financing, we were lucky to receive a fantastic offer from our existing investors that will enable us to continue building our business without the distraction of raising a funding round.”

And from the announcement blog post:

So what’s next? We don’t want to spoil the news, but over the next few months you’ll see new services and applications from DataSift as we continue to build out our social-data platform.

One of the biggest reasons that people choose DataSift is not just that we can filter and deliver raw social data at massive-scale, but we can structure it into a “ready-to-analyze” format with sentiment, Klout Topics Natural Language Topic analysis, etc. for companies to consume.

In its first five months since commercial launch, DataSift says it has signed up close to 200 corporate customers, and counting. To be continued.

Search engine and social optimization software maker SEOmoz has raised $18 million in Series B funding in a round led by The Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, with participation from Ignition Partners. Last time the company raised funding was a $1.1 million seed round secured all the way back in 2007.

Awesomely, SEOmoz decided to shun ‘normal’ press releases to announce the news on its site, using memes. They even invented the word ‘memenouncing’ for it.

Last thing we want to do is spoil it for you – click the link above to see how all press releases should be done.

SEOmoz says it currently has 15,000 paying subscribers and a monthly count of over 2 million unique visitors to its online community. The company predicts revenue between $18 million and $20 million this year, after booking $5.7 million in 2010 and doubling that to $11.4 million in 2011.

SEOmoz will use the new funding to grow its Web index, hire new people, add more social and content functionality to its software and make acquisitions.

No need to spend cash on a sense of humor – they haz it.

A more in-depth announcement penned by co-founder Rand Fishkin can be found on the SEOmoz blog – it’s filled with all sorts of interesting information, factoids and side stories about the company and the fundraising process. Simply awesome.

One important announcement you’ll find at the very bottom of the meme-filled press release: SEOmoz co-founder Gillian Muessig (also Fishkin’s mother) will be leaving the board of directors and her active role as president of the company.

Brad Feld and SEOmoz COO Sarah Bird are joining the board.

If you’re even slightly interested in the goings on in Silicon Valley and the tech scene in general, you’ve more than likely wondered who’s getting funding at any particular time. Sure, there are tech journalists, like your gorgeous staff at The Next Web, to bring you such news, but we can’t cover everything. There are some people who don’t want the fluff and just want to know what money is flowing where and from whom.

A group of technologists have started a site called WhoGotFunded to track just that. The idea is to use text mining technology to surface funding news for all types of company all over the world.

That’s not to say that journalists don’t still have a place in writing about funding, since we provide color and background to a story.

I discussed the idea behind WhoGotFunded with one of the site’s founders, Paul Vivant, and he provided me with some interesting details on how his company, Digimind, plans on making the site the go-to place for funding news.

TNW: What made ​​you come up with the idea for the site?
Paul Vivant: We have worked for years with clients on issues relating to M&A and Venture Capital, on very specific areas of activity. The idea occurred to us that it might be possible to provide a multi-sectoral, globalized approach. The convergence of recent technological innovations has meant that we have achieved today, with whogotfunded.com, what would not have been possible two years ago. The following technological advances have made the project possible.

- The latest innovations in the field of text mining using statistical natural language processing. It also relies on semantic analysis.
- Big Data, technology and its variations (NoSQL) that can manage very large volumes of information
- The explosion of Open Data and microblogging provides huge amounts of fresh information and quality.

TNW: What are your plans, and goals for WhoGotFunded?

Paul Vivant: The ambition of this website is to build the most comprehensive funding database in the world. We envisage it becoming an essential source for venture capitalists, business angels, Founders, CEOs, corporate development executives, journalists, bloggers and investment bankers.

It is possible that over time, depending on the level of interest in the initiative, we may consider adding community features on the model of Wikipedia, to allow visitors to correct and enhance the data. It’s important to recognize that automation generates noise sometimes, even if it remains in controlled proportions.

TNW: Do you see yourselves as a “news organization” about funding?

Paul Vivant: WhoGotFunded.com is definitely a news website about Funding. Digimind is a technology company where news is our raw material. As Tim O’Reilly wrote A Few Years ago , we strongly believe that “Data is the Intel Inside”. All these new technologies can shake up the traditional market players, and how managers understand and relate to their business environment.

TNW: What are some of the other sites out there doing similar things?

Paul Vivant: Crunchbase is one of the Most Famous, It Is Manually curated. You have players like Venturedeal (paid service) Formds.com (only monitoring the SEC), or big players like Dow Jones ( venture capital databases ) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers ( MoneyTree Report )

Our approach is different for several reasons: firstly, our automation process allows us to manage unimaginable volumes of information, the level of coverage and information sources we cover is also unrivalled. This allows us to offer global coverage, while most of the above services focus only on America. Admittedly, this is where substantial investments are made (especially in Silicon Valley), but there’s a considerable amount of VC activity in other hotspots around the world. China is developing a thriving VC market. Companies that are virtually unknown in the West have managed to raise considerable amounts, Bicon raised $ 250M a few days ago, and China Communications Construction, raised $ 790M 3 weeks ago.

In addition we provide full transparency on the sources used, which are available to visitors. This is not always the case with traditional players.

TNW: What’s your background in startups and funding?

Paul Vivant: We self-funded our own development from a relatively small start-up company to one that has over 100 employees. Digimind is majority owned by its founders and we have enjoyed year on year growth for the past 14 years.

Here’s a video intro of what the site will provide:

There’s no doubt that there is simply too much information for any one person to pour through to find a gem of information and as a journalist, a service like this will be extremely valuable. For everyone else, this should be made as simple as peeking at a stock ticker. It will be interesting to see if Digimind can live up to its lofty goals and promises. If it can, we might see the company show up on its own site for some funding news.

➤ Sign up for updates on when WhoGotFunded will go live

Exclusive: Mopapp, a mobile analytics startup founded by – gasp – Italian entrepreneurs and backed by Seedcamp, has secured €1.5 million in funding from an unconventional investor, we’ve learned.

Mopapp basically helps mobile app developers and publishers get a better understanding of how their apps are doing performance-wise (in terms of installs, sales, upgrades, in-app purchasing behavior and more) across a variety of mobile platforms, application stores and devices.

Its solution is particularly useful to developers of cross-platform applications; Mopapp helps its customers track performance on iTunes, Android Market, RIM App World, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Amazon Appstore, GetJar and more.

The London-based startup has just closed a €1.5 million round with a company called CRIF, which delivers credit reporting, business information and related services to primarily financial institutions and insurance companies worldwide.

So why CRIF and not your traditional VC for the follow-up investment?

Explains Alessandro Rizzoli, CEO of Mopapp:

“The integration of CRIF’s expertise in the development of decision system algorithms in the finance sector will help us improve performance and speed up our analytics platform even more.”

As part of the deal, CRIF has signed a service agreement with Mopapp on the basis of which it will provide the startup with specialized personnel and know-how to accelerate its growth.