• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 15, 2014

Social-marketing start-up Thismoment just closed a Series D funding round worth $17.6 million. 

In a word, CEO Vince Broady said the fresh funding is all about “growth.”

Specifically, “our series D will be used for product development, integrating more content sources and enterprise systems and expanding into new geographies and use cases, like sales enablement and social shopping,” Broady said Wednesday. 

The funding follows the launch of Thismoment’s content marketing platform, Content Cloud, earlier this year. The platform was designed to help brand managers more easily mix user-generated content with existing content assets, including approved online ad campaigns and videos. 

Marketers have long sought to harness the power of user-generated content -- and for good reason. Indeed, a recent study by Ipsos found that among millennials, UGC was “20% more influential when it comes to purchasing, and 35% more memorable than other types of media.”

While not the only technology company that promises to turn UGC into gold, “what sets [Thismoment] apart from others in the market is that we are an end-to-end platform for large enterprise content creators,” Broady said. 

“Our ability to monitor, moderate and clear rights to user-generated content across multiple platforms and media types at … scale positions us as the category leader,” he added.

Clients include Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Levi's, Sephora, Intuit and Salesforce.com. Marketing technology partners including Adobe Marketing Cloud, Salesforce1 and and Sprinklr.

Sierra Ventures, Trident Capital and UMC led this latest round.