News has leaked out today that Toronto-based Sysomos, a social media monitoring firm, has been acquired by MarketWire.

As usual, the terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but we do know that, like BumpTop, Sysomos was funded out of the Growthworks Commercialization fund. That would put this deal at well north of $25million, likely landing in at around $35million.  Sysomos was also funded by Ontario Centres of Excellence, who were also instrumental in supporting BumpTop. In fact, like Bumptop, Sysomos also originated at the University of  Toronto and does retain some useful and unique IP.

This is the second exit for Scott Pelton, who only took over managing the Growthwork’s comm fund in 2008. By Canadian VC standards (or any for that matter), he is on fire and, by my estimate, is chalking up one of the best IRRs that the business has seen yet in this country. Who says VC is dead?

Sysomos has made rapid progress since taking investment and has managed to consistently raise the bar of social media monitoring standards. No doubt that MarketWire is looking for ways to develop beyond their more traditional media monitoring solution to something that offers more social media coverage. Sysomos’ strong analytics capability will no doubt be useful to MarketWire customers as well.