Tech company with Las Vegas presence nets expansion funds

A high-tech company with a Las Vegas office has netted funding for expansion.

Banjo, a California-based company that develops social-media apps, announced Wednesday that it received $100 million in funding from Softbank and BlueRun Ventures, a venture-capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

Founded in 2011, Banjo has a local office at 6795 Edmond St., inside Switch’s Innevation Center. Functions include sales and marketing, design, and operations. A spokeswoman said 28 people are currently employed in Las Vegas.

Its engineering staff is mostly in California.

Banjo organizes and maps Earth’s social signals by location, helping business and organizations make better, faster decisions.

Company officials said their new round of funding will enable them to collect and harness global data streams “into one unified source of unmatched insights.” That could mean “faster emergency response, safer driving conditions, smarter marketing decisions, more efficient use of energy and much more.”

Investors said the company’s ideas have big promise.

“Banjo is in an interesting space, bringing together the ideas of big data, social, local, mobile and trying to derive value from that combination for both consumers and businesses,” said Nikesh Arora, vice chairman of Softbank. “I am excited by what I have seen so far, and think this has the potential to be very interesting, and big.”