Social data company Banjo, which has an office in Las Vegas, has received a $100 million investment, CEO Damien Patton announced Wednesday.
The startup previously raised $5 million in its initial round of funding, with an additional $16 million raised in March 2014, bringing Banjo’s total funding to $121 million. Headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., Banjo opened a second office at the InNEVation Center in Las Vegas in 2013, where 28 of its 60 employees currently work. Patton said he expects Banjo to double in size by the end of the year.
The $100 million in funding comes primarily from Japanese telecom and finance company SoftBank, with Menlo Park, Calif. investor BlueRun Ventures also contributing.
Banjo is prioritizing hiring engineering and data scientists with the new investment.
“This money allows us to let engineers know they can leave their jobs and come do something with us that nobody's ever seen before,” Patton said.
At a panel at the two-day Collision Conference in downtown Las Vegas, Martin Giles of Wing Venture Capital prodded Patton about choosing to expand in Las Vegas. Giles called the city “engineer-poor” and wondered whether Banjo could find the necessary human capital locally.
“Vegas is engineer-poor,” Patton told the Sun. “There’s no sidestepping it. You have to look at what Vegas is good at and use what its strengths are, not what you hope it will be. Startups that are coming here hoping it’s the next technology mecca, they’re kidding themselves and they’re going to fail.”
In November 2014, a Brookings Institute study found that Nevada lacks STEM-trained or experienced workers to take new Nevada jobs in the growing health, business, IT and high-tech manufacturing sectors, Nevada’s educational institutions aren’t yet properly preparing students for these jobs, the study found.
And just as troubling, Nevada still ranks dead last in the number of high-value jobs in advanced industry sectors, including computer software, a February Brookings study found.
Patton lauded Las Vegas for providing the kind of talent required for service-based companies like Zappos, but said it’s difficult to find technical depth of expertise locally.
“There are some very smart engineers and technical people in Vegas,” Patton said. “But it’s deficient compared to Silicon Valley, and that gap is not going to close anytime soon.”
But Las Vegas’s strength, Patton said, is its location as an entertainment hub.
“Vegas is where we play catch,” Patton said. “Everyone we want to partner with, they all come to Vegas for conferences or to hang out for the weekend. You just can’t create that anywhere else in the world.”
Banjo, in Patton’s frequent analogy, is like a crystal ball — it parses vast amounts of data and activity on social media networks to sniff out planned events and predict the unplanned. The startup uses its technology to allow brands to detect mentions, photos and videos of products on social media using sophisticated recognition software.
“Brands are able to know what happens anywhere in the world, without anyone talking about it,” Patton said. “A t-shirt being worn, a video, a photo … Imagine being able to know how your brand is being inclusively shared in real-time by the consumer. The consumer now is telling the story about the brand to other consumers.”