Fleming raises $4.5 million in Silicon Valley
Twenty-five-year-old entrepreneur from Limburg is raising millions to finance his startup in San Francisco
Young Fleming's Twitter management business is going after the big money
Kestens began by designing a website for his home town and later studied computer programming in Kortrijk. But he dropped out to start his own business. That one failed, but two attempts later he had come up with TwitSpark, which allows companies to monitor a massive number of Twitter and other social media threads, keeping track of mentions of their own name and allowing them to respond rapidly and directly.
Last year Kestens raised €1.1 million in Flanders to allow him to move to Silicon Valley and go after the big money. In the meantime, TwitSpark, now renamed Sparkcentral, has gathered clients of the stature of Electrabel, Brussels Airlines and the US airline Delta.
“We have big plans in the world of call centres and customer service units; we’re not just a Twitter tool any more” Kestens told De Tijd, explaining the name-change. “Our ambitions are far bigger, and we needed a name that gets that across.”
