By Lauren Tara LaCapra
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dataminr Inc, a technology company that alerts traders, government officials and journalists to important tweets, has lost its chief financial officer.
The abrupt departure of Tania Secor, who had been CFO since November 2013, comes a few months after the company raised a third round of funding from high-profile investors, valuing the company at $700 million.
Two people familiar with the company told Reuters that Secor left unexpectedly this week with no explanation to staff from management. A person who answered the phone at Dataminr said Secor was no longer with the company. Secor did not respond to attempts to reach her by phone, text, email or her social media accounts.
Spokespeople for Dataminr said they could not immediately comment on Secor because people they needed to ask about her departure were travelling.
Dataminr is viewed as a hot startup in New York's burgeoning technology sector, partly because of its special partnership with Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) Inc. Twitter allows the company to access its "firehose" of public tweets — a complete data set of messages sent out by those of its 302 million active users who allow them to be seen by anyone.
Dataminr says it has an algorithm that can analyse the Twitter data stream and isolate tweets that appear especially important. Dataminr analysts then sort through those selected tweets to alert clients about stocks, geopolitical issues, major crimes and other types of events before they are reported through mainstream media.
The site said it was first to alert subscribers about major news events including an airport shooting in Djibouti last August and a lightning strike in Venice Beach, California, a month earlier.
Investors in its $130 million fundraising round in March include Fidelity, Wellington Management Co and Credit Suisse (SIX:CSGN) Group AG, as well as individuals like former Wall Street bank CEOs John Mack and Vikram Pandit.
Secor had previously held CFO positions at the expert network firm Gerson Lehrman Group, and for divisions of wealth management firm Geller & Co and what was then known as The McGraw Hill Cos, according to her LinkedIn profile.