Javier Burón wanted to know who was following. A business followed.

A large following is a flattering thing to acquire and a rather awkward thing to understand. Javier Burón and his collaborators discovered the second problem after enjoying the first. They had built Followfriday, a way of ranking the recommendations Twitter users made about one another. The recommendations attracted people. Then came the question that would occupy much of Burón’s working life: who, exactly, were all these people?

The answer became SocialBro, launched in 2011, and later Audiense. Burón’s career travelled from computing and university teaching into the less predictable business of running a company. Along the way came London, investors, larger customers, a new name and acquisitions. The recurring subject was human behaviour, approached by someone whose original tools were software and a willingness to keep experimenting.

The followers became the question

The early enterprise was a collective undertaking. Burón worked with Alfredo Artiles and Luis Pablo Pardo; their consultancy, Equipo 24, gave them a way to earn money while developing applications of their own. Client work financed room to try things. In the respectable language of business, this is called bootstrapping. It also involves doing today’s work so that tomorrow’s idea can afford to exist.

Burón brought a computing background and experience teaching at the University of Córdoba. His teaching included human-computer interaction, a useful subject for anyone hoping other people will actually use the software they build. SocialBro initially addressed a problem the founders recognised themselves: making a growing Twitter community intelligible. Who followed an account? Where were they? How could someone examine that community without manually inspecting an endless procession of profiles?

It was an unglamorous enough difficulty to be promising. The founders were building a working instrument for a platform whose audience was expanding, and the instrument found an audience of its own. By September 2011, SocialBro had reached 35,000 users. The initial question had escaped the founders’ office.

London supplied a different education

Writing software did not automatically teach Burón how to finance a software company. He spoke candidly about approaching venture capital from an engineering and product background. Investors had their own vocabulary, incentives and timetables. Carlos Serra, an early investor who later joined the leadership team, helped him understand that world. Among the lessons was an expensive one in any young business: raising money takes time.

London became part of the answer. Burón moved there as SocialBro developed its international commercial operation and became involved with Seedcamp. Development remained in Córdoba. The arrangement put different parts of the business where they could work: Spanish engineering alongside access to the UK’s marketing talent, partners and investors. The geography was practical, even if the coordination required rather more than a change of address.

A £1.2 million round led by Scottish Equity Partners followed in 2013. Burón described plans to strengthen sales, marketing and partnerships, while improving how users learned to get value from the product. The software needed explaining as well as selling. A customer with a powerful tool and no idea what to do next is still a customer with a problem.

A guitar, and a less abstract audience

Burón’s enthusiasm for Twitter was more personal than an investor presentation might suggest. A business trip to San Francisco produced an internet bill of $4,000. After he raised the matter on Twitter, the bill came down to $300. For someone selling the commercial significance of public conversation, it was a conveniently concrete demonstration. The theory had arrived with an invoice.

“Twitter is not just broadcasting, it is conversations.”

Javier Burón, 2013

There was also music. A 2014 portrait of Burón described a fondness for punk and a guitar in his London home. The technology founder with rock interests is hardly an unknown species. Yet the detail supplies some welcome texture to a career often recorded in rounds and product launches. The guitar belongs in the picture alongside the dashboards and product launches, a reminder that a career takes up only part of a life.

His early confidence in Twitter was considerable. He saw a communications medium with a larger role ahead of it, and treated changes to the platform as opportunities for developers. That optimism belonged to a particular stage of the internet. Following his subsequent career means watching the business become broader than the platform on which that confidence was first placed.

A name the customers outgrew

Early SocialBro customers included smaller agencies and people managing sizeable followings. Larger organisations began arriving with different budgets and different expectations. Burón described the work of adapting the platform for customers such as Universal Music, the BBC and Puma. A tool built for social accounts was being asked to answer questions with consequences elsewhere in a business.

In March 2016, SocialBro became Audiense. The old name meant Social Browser, an accurate description of where the product had begun. Burón explained the change in terms of customers whose requirements had become more sophisticated. Browsing a community was giving way to understanding it well enough to make marketing decisions. Names have the advantage of being shorter than product roadmaps; occasionally, they also need replacing.

Audiense launched Insights in 2017. Over time, the company’s work included segmentation, identifying relevant influencers and understanding shared interests within a larger population. That puts a useful distinction inside the word audience. A crowd may appear as a single number on a dashboard while containing groups with very different reasons for being there.

The company he wanted to work in

For Burón, the company itself was another design problem. In 2013 he described an ambition that had shifted from getting rich toward making a place where people enjoyed working. Meeting employees at Twitter in San Francisco had influenced him. He wanted someone saying they worked at SocialBro to receive the sort of response that suggested their friends rather wished they did too.

“Queremos una empresa que mole.”

Javier Burón, 2013 - “We want a company that’s cool.”

His account of the London move also made room for multiculturalism. Different nationalities, he said, enriched the team. That is a more human way to describe international expansion than a map decorated with pins. The business crossed borders through people who had to work together, explain their ideas and make sense of customers whose habits were not necessarily their own.

By 2020, Audiense was also helping make the case for audience intelligence as a recognised software category. It worked alongside competitors and industry practitioners in the effort around G2’s new category. Competition in this corner of software included the occasional shared task: persuading buyers that the work deserved a name of its own.

Buying the next set of questions

In December 2022, Audiense acquired SOPRISM, adding consumer insight capabilities across Facebook and Instagram. Burón framed the purchase around making audience insights more accessible to brands. The audience question now extended further across the social internet, with another team and product helping answer it.

Tweet Binder followed in May 2023. Its expertise was Twitter analytics, including hashtag tracking. Audiense said it would keep the product independent and support its development. Founder Javier Ábrego had watched SocialBro for years. His account of the transaction emphasised the relationship with the people involved, direct communication and the prospect of a continuing home for the community he had built.

Later that month came the acquisition of Affinio Social. Its former owner, NOW Vertical, became an investor in Audiense as part of the transaction. The sequence brought several established audience tools into the same business. Each arrived with its own history. For Burón, running the company increasingly meant taking responsibility for work begun by other founders, alongside the work he had helped start.

The audience keeps changing

By September 2024, Burón was discussing a wider social data industry with podcast host Andrew Jenkins. Their conversation ranged across Audiense’s evolution, IBM Watson, ChatGPT and additional data sources. The vocabulary had travelled some distance from an early Twitter utility, while the underlying interest in understanding groups of people remained recognisable.

On March 18, 2025, Buxton announced its acquisition of Audiense. Buxton brought consumer analytics and location intelligence, and had already acquired ecommerce tracking business Elevar. Burón, quoted as Audiense’s CEO at the announcement, described the combination as a way to expand capabilities and help more brands understand their audiences. In 2026, the three businesses came together under the Audiense name.

The current combined company lists Jim Swift as CEO. Burón’s public biography describes his work in product strategy and innovation at Audiense. His founding chapter now sits within a larger organisation, still concerned with the problem that made the first tool useful. The people behind a number have interests, affiliations and choices. Burón began by wanting a better look at them. It proved a sufficiently interesting question to keep asking.