Tech tracker round-up: Twitter posts healthy profit, Pusher raises $8 million in funding

Here the Evening Standard business team highlights all the major tech news today.

The main story today sees Twitter report its second profitable quarter, beating Wall Street estimates for revenue and monthly active users.

Daily active users grew 10% year-over-year while overall monthly user numbers rose 3% to 336 million, just above a forecast of 334 million, sending the company’s shares as much as 10% higher.

US President Donald Trump has kept the San Francisco-based service in the headlines domestically but growth has been faster abroad as Twitter has tried to grow its user base and ad business.

International sales accounted for 48% of revenue, growing 53% year-over-year, compared with 2% in the United States. Total revenue rose 21%.

Twitter said it added 5 million people outside the United States and 1 million people inside its home market, compared with the fourth quarter, with the company pointing to strong growth in Asia.

Known for short messages, Twitter has paid to develop live shows and broadcast live events, using videos to get people to spend more time on the service and to sell video ads to marketers.

Videos accounted for more than half of ad revenue in the quarter.

The social media sector is under intense pressure from lawmakers around the globe for inflaming political debates, allowing abusive language and failing to safeguard personal data.

While there have been few signs that users have abandoned social media, companies like Twitter and Facebook face the prospect of costs rising as lawmakers seek new regulations to avoid abuse and misuse of their sites.

Elsewhere Pusher, the company that helps developers add communication and collaboration features to their apps, has announced funding of $8 million led by Balderton Capital.

More than 200,000 developers worldwide are using Pusher’s products and more than 40 billion messages per day are now sent using APIs provided by the company, connecting more than eight billion devices per month.

Based in London, Pusher currently employs 60 people.

By the end of 2018 the company hopes to have up to 30 people working in a new US office. The US team, which will be made up of sales, marketing and customer support staff, will initially be based in the offices of investor Heavybit.

Seperately SEMrush, the leading competitive intelligence and end-to-end analytics platform for digital marketing professionals, has raised a total of $40 million in funding led by Greycroft, Siguler Guff, and e.ventures.

SEMrush is the industry standard to improve insights, analytics, and measurement for digital marketers.

It is used by leading brands, such as Booking.com, eBay, HP, and BNP Paribas.