• Venture Beat, Monday, January 10, 2011 2:15 PM

Simple social measurement service Klout has secured $8.5 million, led by Kleiner Perkins. According to VentureBeat: "The investment is part of Kleiner's $250M sFund for social startups, and the firm's Bing Gordon will be joining Klout's board of directors." With the new funding, Klout says it plans to expand its engineering team to include more online services in addition to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

"It's also aiming to expand the consumer experience to help users make more sense of their online reputation, and potentially make better use of it as well," VentureBeat notes. Additional investors included Greycroft Partners, Asset Management, Paige Craig, Howard Lindzon and Thomas McInerney. The The San Francisco-based start previously raised $1.5 million in angel funding. Klout ranks a user based on how much "influence" they have on a particular site so they know how they stack up against all other users. On Twitter, for instance, the service estimates how many people pay attention to as user's tweets out of all of their followers.

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