Reputation.com raises $30 million to help businesses manage their online presence

Reputation.com (formerly ReputationDefender) is a Redwood City, California-based company that provides solutions for tracking and improving online reviews and local search visibility for businesses. Today, Reputation revealed it has secured $30 million in equity financing led by Ascension Ventures, bringing its total raised to over $100 million. New investors Akkadian Ventures, Industry Ventures, and River City Ventures also participated in the firm’s most recent fundraising round, alongside prior backers Kleiner Perkins, August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Heritage Group, and Icon Ventures.

The capital infusion comes roughly a year after Reputation sold off its direct-to-consumer business, and it follows a period of sustained expansion during which the company grew net revenue retention 124% year over year. In addition to brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, GM, Target Optical, Ford, Enterprise, and U.S. Bank, Reputation currently counts three of the top five automotive OEMs, more than 10,000 auto dealerships in the U.S., over 250 health care systems, and more than 100 property management firms among its customers.

“In today’s feedback economy, we’re seeing growing demand among brands in every industry for innovative ways to manage and take action on ‘data in the wild’ — the unstructured customer sentiment data that lives outside of … surveys,” said Reputation CEO Joe Fuca, formerly DocuSign vice president and president of FinancialForce. “Brands can’t rely on private surveys anymore, as more than 70% of consumers use information from reviews and social media to make purchasing decisions. As the leader in the … space, Reputation delivers the only platform that can gather and analyze feedback from all channels — structured and unstructured — collectively, providing actionable insights that lead to impactful [customer experience] improvements.”

Reputation isn’t the only company vying for a slice of the multibillion-dollar reputation management software market — others include ReviewTrackers, ReviewPush, and Chatmeter, to name a few. But Reputation claims it has an industry-leading differentiator in its Reputation Score, a 1-to-1,000 consumer sentiment metric it calculates using proprietary algorithms that collect and analyze data relevant to a brand’s reputation.

Separately, Reputation’s AI-imbued toolset lets businesses monitor reviews across Google Search, Facebook, and hundreds of other sites from a centralized hub, enabling them to respond quickly through existing ticketing systems. Additionally, it helps claim search, maps, and business directories listings and audit those listings to identify discrepancies and missing data, and it facilitates customer survey response collection via email, SMS, and location-based kiosks.

“Ascension Ventures is excited to deepen its partnership with Reputation.com as it enters its next critical stage of growth,” said Ascension Ventures’ John Kuelper. “We’ve watched Reputation.com’s industry-leading reputation management offering grow into an even more expansive [customer experience] platform. We’re seeing some of the world’s largest brands and service providers achieve terrific results by partnering with Reputation.com to analyze and take action on customer feedback — wherever it originates — at scale and in real time. We’re excited to make this additional investment in Reputation.com as it continues to grow and expand its market leadership.”

In addition to its headquarters in Redwood City, Reputation has offices in Chicago, Illinois; Tempe, Arizona; Hyderabad, India; Liverpool, U.K.; Mannheim, Germany; and Paris, France.