Clearspring Technologies, Inc, provider of the largest social content sharing platform AddThis, has closed a USD20M series D round of funding led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), alongside Clearspring’s existing investors. IVP has funded some of the fastest-growing, data-driven online companies including Twitter and Zynga.
This investment comes amid a period of continued, significant growth for Clearspring as a company, as a platform and as a provider of real-time interest data on Internet audiences. The funding will be used to accelerate Clearspring’s next-generation publisher products and continued growth of its advertising offerings, as well as to help fuel strategic acquisitions.
The AddThis sharing tool, with its widely recogniszed orange box with white plus sign icon, is a familiar sight on more than 9M websites enabling users globally to share content easily with their friends through more than 300 different social networks in 70 languages. Armed with collective insight into what over 1B unique Internet users choose to read and share monthly through AddThis, Clearspring enables advertisers to reach the right audiences at the right time via ad exchanges and demand-side platforms.
IVP has a track record of backing truly significant digital companies that stand out as the best of breed in their respective market. “Clearspring processes 10TB of data per day. This is as much data per week as the entire digital Library of Congress has stored online,” says Sandy Miller (pictured), General Partner at IVP. “This massive data set, coupled with their scalable and differentiated real-time data processing capabilities, puts Clearspring in a unique position to not only take advantage of the rising demand for audience data in advertising, but also enables them to disrupt a number of other markets. We’re excited about the investment and the growing opportunities associated with big data online.”
The AddThis platform has grown from reaching 200M users in 2008 to being one of the ten largest audiences online today. AddThis is also one of twenty web tools world-wide with a Google Page Rank of 10. With revenue on track to triple this year, the company is hiring a new employee almost every week, which will result in it almost doubling its staff this year.
“We’ve had a singular focus on making it easy for publishers to drive traffic to their sites via social sharing, while providing best-of-breed analytics to help them optimise their sites to capitalise on that traffic. As a result of our focus, we’ve built a massive reach,” says, Hooman Radfar, co-founder and CEO of Clearspring. “With this investment, we can now bring the power of that reach back to the individual publisher via our next generation tools and services, which will focus on providing publishers actionable data, not just from the social web, but the entire web. Imagine the challenges we can help a publisher solve- -it’s a staggering opportunity.”
IVP joins Clearspring’s impressive roster of investors including New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, former AOL vice chair and president Ted Leonsis, AOL co-founder Steve Case, Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris, and Silicon Valley super-angel Ron Conway.
“We’ve always held the view that big data would be one of the most valuable assets to come out of the social web,” says Ted Leonsis, Clearspring’s Chairman, as well as founder, CEO and majority owner of Monumental Sports and Entertainment and owner of the Washington Capitals, Wizards, Mystics and Verizon Center. “It is no surprise to anyone close to the company that we have parlayed our expertise in social sharing to achieve a reach surpassing Yahoo!. In the last year, we’ve started to leverage that reach via our Audience Platform. But we’ve just started to scratch the surface. With this investment, we’ll see just how far we can go.”
