SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 9, 2013) - Nexgate (www.nexgate.com) the pioneer in social infrastructure governance for the enterprise today announced $3.5 million in Series A financing led by Sierra Ventures.

Nexgate, formerly Social iQ Networks, previously launched its SaaS-based Enterprise Suite in 2012 to provide a complete solution for discovering, protecting, and ensuring compliance for all of the social accounts associated with a given company, brand or brands. In use by over a dozen multi-national and enterprise companies today, Nexgate plans to leverage this round of investment to accelerate the company's technology innovation and go-to-market execution.

"Over the last few years Altimeter has been covering the need to address social media risk and governance by the enterprise," said Alan Webber, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group. "As the enterprise investment in, and, usage of, social media has continued to increase exponentially, the number of costly crises and real compliance mishaps has also continued to mount. We believe that guarding against those risks must become a top priority for CMOs and CIOs. It is great to see the venture community help foster growth in this important area of social media."

"There is no question that compliance and security is absolutely a requirement as organizations continue to adopt and implement external social networks as part of their key communication channels," said Mark Fernandes, Managing Director, Sierra Ventures, who joins the Nexgate board of directors with this round of funding. "We have seen the massive investment in public social media by enterprises first hand and we know that protecting that investment is a priority. After doing the research with customers and the market, we know that the Nexgate's world-class team and technology is the right way to tackle this growing segment of the multi-billion dollar social media market."

"We are pleased to add the support of a firm of Sierra's caliber," said Devin Redmond, Co-founder and CEO, Nexgate. "Our customers and prospects have clearly expressed their need for better protection and compliance for social media and they will be even more enthusiastic about what we can do for them with this new round of funding. We will immediately expand our solution development and customer facing teams to drive forward our product delivery and market development."

About Nexgate
Founded in May of 2011, Nexgate is focused on enabling businesses to safely and compliantly use the Social Web. Nexgate helps some of the leading enterprises in Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Internet Security, Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment, and Retail discover, audit, and protect their infrastructure of social accounts and applications. With multiple patents pending, Nexgate is pioneering compliance and protection for Social Networks as they evolve as a largely externalized communication infrastructure for enterprises.

About Sierra Ventures
Since 1982, Sierra Ventures, a privately held venture capital firm, has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs around the world begin and grow successful technology companies. Sierra is investing out of its tenth fund and currently has more than $1.2 billion of capital under management, focusing on investments across all areas of the information technology sector from semiconductors to enterprise software. For more information please visit: http://www.sierraventures.com.