Huddle raises another whopping round

British success story Huddle has joined the ranks of European countries looking to the US for follow-on venture funding. The company announces today a $24 million Series C round.

As you know, we don’t cover a lot of funding rounds, acquisitions or other “bloggier” stuff. But, hey, that’s one of the benefits of being in the Kernel 50.

Huddle co-founder and executive vice president of strategy Andy McLoughlin told me last night that the company has raised a $24 million Series C round, which they will use to double their headcount, further develop their technology and better serve a list of clients that runs to six figures.

The financing was led by Jafco Ventures, with participation from DAG Ventures and existing investors Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures.

Huddle’s collaboration software is used by the UK Government and 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies including NASA, Diageo, Unilever and Procter and Gamble.

McLoughlin told me that Huddle’s primary focus is now “intelligent content collaboration”. It is the the only company claiming to approach collaboration with contextualised data discovery.

“Huddle has developed patent-pending intelligent technology that helps users make sense of the ever-growing amount of information and deconstruct the complex relationships between organizations to facilitate easy interaction with content,” he says.

“Instead of searching for information that you need to do your job, your work is automatically delivered to you.”

“This latest round of funding further validates that our approach is unique,” says McLoughlin, “Even in a seemingly crowded marketplace. And it will help us continue to drive massive growth.”

This is a ballsy start-up, which squared up to Google and forced Mountain View to change the name of one of its Google+ features that was previously called Huddle.

Huddle also bit the hand that once fed it by crashing a Microsoft Sharepoint conference in Anaheim in 2011 with a full cheerleading squad and college band. (Huddle is a BizSpark One flagship start-up.)

Unlike some of its competitors who are reputed to be haemorrhaging cash and have had to raise hundreds of millions of dollars just to stay afloat, this British success story has built a scalable, profitable business that is now poised to take the Americans on in their back yard.

There is some cause, then, for Box – and possibly Yammer too – to be concerned.

The company is now co-headquartered in London and San Francisco, with operations in New York.