Socius Raises $415,000

Norway-based social media startup Socius closed this month a $415,000 seed round for expansion of its North American operations.

The investment comes from 500 Startups and Norwegian angel investor Raa Invest, and values the startup at $1.9 million.

Socius, which is backed also by Axel Springer, says it’s a social media storytelling platform. It helps publishers run interactive content marketing campaigns while increasing advertising capacity and return on investment, and augmenting their journalistic reach.

Offering more

“We have evolved from being a simple social media aggregator to a tool solving the major challenges in the publishing industry,” Daniel Butler, CEO of Socius, said in a statement. “ We offer contextually relevant native ads and call-to-actions that are ad-block resistant. These have a click-through-rate up to ten times higher than the industry average.”

Earlier this year, New York-headquartered Conde Nast picked Socius to rebuild its homepage for a social media creativity campaign. The deal with the publisher of magazines like WiredVogue and The New Yorker was a major milestone for Socius.

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