Social media publishing tool ContentCal raises £470,000

ContentCal, a social media publishing tool for businesses, has raised £470,000 in its latest funding round.

Backed by a range of existing shareholders and some new angel investors, that included the likes of James Murray (who sold AIM-listed business Alternative Networks for £165 million in 2016), the London-based start-up has now raised £1.1m to date.

Providing businesses with a single platform from which to plan, publish and collaborate all of their social media content, ContentCal's user interface, which is based around the format of a content calendar, is designed to naturally replace the documents that social media managers normally work with.

Targeted towards businesses’ in-house social media teams, ContentCal also supplies freelancers and small agencies doing social media management for small businesses and bigger brands.

Counting the likes of Honda, Lebara Mobile, Oxford University and SSE as clients, the start-up will use the fresh funds to drive growth and expand into international markets.

Preparing for a Series A to enter the US in 2018, other future plans include investing in new technologies such as blockchain and AI as well as investing in sales and marketing to grow its user base.

To support further investment and future plans, the business has also opened a sales office in Maidenhead in the UK and a technology hub in Szechin, Poland.

In just two years, ContentCal has grown from two to 26 people and has amassed more than 2,000 customers.

Alex Packham, founder and CEO of ContentCal, said:

“Building ContentCal has been a huge journey.

“We started out as a small social media marketing agency with big ambitions but it was when we decided to focus and invest our efforts in the software business for social media that everything changed.

“The ContentCal platform has enabled us to scale our best practices for managing social media content to agencies and brands, and this a real game changer.

“We are confident that the product offers something unique to the market and we are working hard to make it the number one tool for social media planning and management.

“We believe there needs to be more transparency in terms of the large volume of work carried out by both brands and agencies in order to maintain a successful social media presence.

“ContentCal aims to support brands with their vision and provide them with the tools to succeed.”