No chimp change for SurveyMonkey: $250 million investment means online survey company now valued at close to $2 billion

Online survey platform SurveyMonkey is now valued at close to $US2 billion ($A2.4b) after raising $250 million in equity financing.

Fortune reports the California-based company will use the funding injection to pursue expansion plans, including possible acquisitions.

SurveyMonkey acquired Canadian online survey platform company Fluidware in August for a sum reported to be about $20 million. As part of its international expansion, it also opened an office in Sydney in May, and now has international offices in London, Dublin, Luxembourg and Ottawa.

The new round of funding included investment from T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and Baillie Gifford & Co. These investors join current investors including Google Capital and Tiger Global Management.

Speaking to StartupSmart in May about the opening of its Sydney office, SurveyMonkey chief executive David Goldberg said it was important for the company to develop a “war chest” to fund its growth, especially in the area of mobile.

“I think we’re still very early in a lot of the changes that are happening. We’re going to really see the advantages of tying these services together. That’s still early on but we’re beginning to see that as customers begin to tie SurveyMonkey together with other applications so they are integrated rather than siloed,” Goldberg said.

“We’re also really early on in mobile … We’re doing in mobile what we did in the early days of the web where we just took things we were used to in the analogue world and put them online, we’re still in that stage of putting the web onto mobile.”