Press Releases

Emeryville – 6 January, 2010 – Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network, announced today that it completed an $18 million round of Series C equity funding in December 2009, adding two new venture capital partnerships – DAG Ventures and Tenaya Capital.  The new funding will support the company’s extraordinary current growth rates well into the future and solidify its market-leading position.  DAG Ventures and Tenaya Capital join three current investors participating in the round -- Benchmark Capital, Emergence Capital, and Shasta Ventures – each of which also invested in a $12M Series B financing round in June 2008.

The announcement comes on the heels of 2009 being another record fiscal quarter and year for Lithium in terms of new product bookings, new customers, and expansion with existing customers.  The company’s growth and momentum drove the decision to fuel the top-line around the world by leveraging more capabilities and resources to expand the customer base.

"In a period when most companies were suffering from macro-economic pressures, Lithium thrived and built a great team with powerful solutions," said Peter Fenton, partner, Benchmark Capital.  "It’s very clear to us that Lithium’s deep roots in community management and thought leadership in enterprise social media has allowed them to differentiate and continuously drive value for their customers.  With the latest results and financing, Lithium is now uniquely positioned to dominate this emerging market."

"Our customers have been extremely successful in building and managing their social customer networks with the unique science in our software as well as the expertise of our superb staff.  That success has fueled Lithium's explosive growth in the last 18 months.  The additional funding and venture partnerships will provide us with a tremendous lift into 2010 and beyond," said Lyle Fong, founder and CEO, Lithium Technologies.  "This is an exciting moment for Lithium as we will now use these resources and momentum to be even more aggressive -- further extending our leadership in Social CRM and customer communities, while continuing to generate multi-million dollar returns for our customers."

Lithium is the leader in Social Customer Relationship Management (Social CRM) solutions, giving companies the ability to create and manage their own social customer networks, centering around community applications and sophisticated integration with traditional CRM systems and conversations across the social web.  After launching several innovative products this year including the Community Health Index, the Tribal Knowledge Base and Lithium Mobile along with the content moderation solution from the Keibi Technologies acquisition, the company has even more exciting plans to drive customer success and business returns in the form of accelerated innovation, brand promotion, and reduced support costs.  Industry leaders like Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal already rely on Lithium to deliver industry-leading solutions for customer-to-customer interactions. 

About Lithium Technologies

Lithium is the leading provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network. Working with market leaders such as Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is delivering the next generation of customer relationships by unlocking the value of the social customer network. Lithium solutions combine the power of online customer communities with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes to inspire customers to innovate, promote, and support on the company's behalf. As a result, businesses measurably improve their marketing and sales, accelerate innovation, and increase customer satisfaction. Lithium's platform is proven in high-volume, growth environments and provides the security, analytics, APIs, and multi-language support that enterprises demand. Founded in 2001, Lithium is privately held with headquarters in Emeryville, California. For more information, visit www.lithium.com.

About DAG Ventures

DAG Ventures is a venture capital partnership investing in and helping outstanding entrepreneurs create leading, long-term companies across a range of markets. With roots from the 1980’s in cable TV, infrastructure, media, and wireless industries, the partnership today is privileged to work with world-class entrepreneurs as they build tomorrow’s leaders in the information technology, energy, and life science sectors. For more information on DAG Ventures, visit www.dagventures.com.

About Tenaya Capital

Tenaya Capital is a leading venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, California, and Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1995 as Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital became an independent company in 2009. Over the years it has raised five funds representing over $1 billion of committed capital, investing it in a wide range of high-growth technology companies including software, consumer Internet, communications, semiconductors, electronics, and cleantech.  For more information on Tenaya Capital, visit www.tenayacapital.com.

About Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital, a leading international venture capital firm, was founded in 1995 to help talented entrepreneurs with original ideas build successful technology companies. Benchmark's general partners take a team-oriented, labor-intensive approach to venture investing to deliver a superior level of service to the firm's portfolio companies. Benchmark's portfolio includes high-profile start-ups like Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, Second Life, Tellme, Yelp, and Zillow, and franchise companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks and Red Hat. The firm manages nearly $3.5 billion in committed venture capital. For more information on Benchmark Capital, visit www.benchmark.com.

About Emergence Capital

Emergence Capital Partners, based in San Mateo, Calif., is the leading venture capital firm focused on early and growth-stage Technology-Enabled Services companies. Its mission is to help build market leaders in partnership with great entrepreneurs. Emergence partners have funded and helped build more than 35 TES companies, more than any other early-stage venture firm. Emergence Capital has assets of over $325 million under management. Emergence partners were early investors in Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), as well as other market-leading companies such as SuccessFactors (NASDAQ: SFSF), HireRight (IPO, merged with USIS), aQuantive (IPO, acquired by Microsoft), DoubleClick (IPO, acquired by Google), Ask Jeeves (IPO, acquired by IAC) and WebTV (acquired by Microsoft). Through its close association with Salesforce.com and other SaaS leaders, Emergence Capital Partners is working to accelerate the movement of all software to the on-demand model and is championing a new approach to venture capital investing. For more information on Emergence Capital, visit www.emcap.com.

About Shasta Ventures 

Shasta Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology-enabled businesses serving consumers and enterprises. Located in Menlo Park, California, Shasta Ventures has $460 million dollars under management. Shasta was formed in 2004 by venture capital veterans and has made nearly 40 investments to date across consumer and business services, infrastructure and software. For more information on Shasta Ventures, please visit www.shastaventures.com.

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Lithium Media Contacts:

Michael Paige, Corporate Headquarters & Global, michael.paige@lithium.com , +1 (510) 318 7014
Sandra Teuber, Central & Southern Europe, sandra.teuber@lithium.com , +41 (79) 223 7356
Prelini Chiechi, UK & Northern Europe, prelini.chiechi@lithium.com, +44 (7826) 912788
Imogen Riley, APAC & Australia, imogen.riley@lithium.com, +61 413 274 210