Morning Consult valued at over $1 billion following new funding round

Morning Consult, the Washington, D.C.-based research and polling firm, has raised a $60 million Series B round that values the company at over $1 billion.

Why it matters: It's a rare tech success story coming out of D.C.

• "We took a very different approach to building the tech first," says Michael Ramlet, co-founder and CEO of the firm, "in a field that was ripe for disruption," he noted, referencing the $90 billion global market research industry.

Details: The round is being led by Advance Venture Partners to accelerate the company's investments in global data collection and its presence in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and to scale its data set, says Ramlet.

• Additional investors in the round include Susquehanna Growth Equity and Lupa Systems.
• The company is hoping to expand its data collection capabilities in 15 of the countries with the largest economies, to 50, by year's end. It also wants to grow its proprietary data set of 20 million interviews to 35 million in that time.

The big picture: Morning Consult launched with little outside capital. The company launched via a friends-and-family round of $30,000 in 2014.

• It raised a $31 million Series A funding round last year, bringing its total private funding to $91 million. At the time of its Series A round, it was valued at $306 million, three times less than its current valuation.