$700 million startup Dataminr just poached the COO of another hot startup to be its CFO
The company, which takes a firehose of data from social media sources like Twitter and transforms it into useful information and reports for companies, has hired former Googler Julio Pekarovic and Reuters' Steven Schwartz.
Julio Pekarovic, Google's former VP of Finance, has come on board as Dataminr's Chief Financial Officer. He is a particularly notable hire because he jumped ship from another seemingly-hot startup, Canary, after just one year. Pekarovic was COO of Canary, which is a home security camera startup that's kind of like Dropcam; the product took off after it launched an immensely popular Kickstarter campaign and it raised $30 million from investors in June.
Steven Schwartz, who used to run Reuters' largest business unit, will head up Dataminr's news division.
Schwartz enters at a time when Dataminr's news operations, which launched in 2014, are moving at a breakneck pace. "Dataminr's entry into the news business has been unprecedented, installing in over 200 newsrooms at a pace faster than any new information product I have seen during my career," he said. Dataminr's news product has been described as "TweetDeck on steroids."
And it's not just the news division that has been growing fast.
Earlier this year, Dataminr raised $130 million in Series D funding at a reported $700 million valuation, bringing its total funding to $180 million. The company is backed by investors like Fidelity, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Institutional Venture Partners.
This investment has helped Dataminr branch out into new verticals, bringing social media data to bear on more and more industries. Dataminr recently rolled out a new product for security and crisis management, which notifies companies about emerging threats so they can make the right counter moves.
Dataminr wants to build on this growth, and ex-Googler Pekarovic will be instrumental to those plans.
"Julio Pekarovic joined Google at a time when the company was the same size as Dataminr is today," Dataminr CEO Ted Bailey said. "And [he] helped grow their revenue at a rate of 250x to $22 billion over a seven-year period."