Awe.sm nets $4M for social data monitoring platform

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Awe.sm has secured $4 million in funding led by the Foundry Group, the company will announce Thursday. The new investment round, which serves as the company’s Series A, also had participation from GRP Partners, Neu Venture Capital and kbs+p Ventures.

At the moment, Awe.sm is probably best known for its URL shortening service. But the San Francisco-based startup says it’s actually rooted in a deeper software platform attached to those shortened links that provides analytics tools for websites and apps to monitor social media activity about their properties. The company says it will use the new money to hire more staff and expand its data analytics offerings. It’s a smart move for Awe.sm to focus more on that side of its business, as Twitter launched its own URL shortening service this past summer.

While social media analytics and URL shortening are both pretty crowded spaces at the moment, Awe.sm has already established itself well in the 2.5 years its been in business: Among its hundreds of customers are Groupon(s GRPN) and Playdom, according to the company.

In a statement released Thursday, GRP Partners’ Mark Suster explained his firm’s latest investment in Awe.sm thusly: “In a world where companies are mindlessly paying money for ‘Likes’ or ‘Followers’, we welcome the new era in which people will use awe.sm data to start spending their social media budgets on real metrics like customer conversions. I believe the end of the hyped phase of social media has begun.” That seems like something we can all root for.