As previously widely speculated, Six Apart, the makers of the TypePad blogging platform and MovableType blogging tool today announced that they have closed a Series C round of financing of $12 Million. The round was raised from Focus Ventures, Intel Capital and August Capital and brings total amount Six Apart has raised to $23 Million.
Six Apart seem to be doing well with a large subscriber base at TypePad and their recent announcement of TypePad business class and a new plan to bring more businesses into blogging easier. SixApart have a lot more growing to do and this latest round of funding should see them through the next phases of growth.
Also SixApart today announced that they have acquired SplashBlog for an undisclosed sum. SplashBlog is a blogging solution for mobile phones and PDA’s and we should shortly see this service integrated with Six Apart’s existing services.
Well good on them. These guys will really be the blogging market mogul whereas wordpress/automattic will be the free,open ,easy blog choice in that market.
With $23 million invested one wonders what kind of exit the investors have in mind… If it’s a buyout it won’t be a little one.
How close is 6 Apart to cash flow neutral? Are they going to need a Series D?
Potentially exciting news regarding SplashBlog – depending on how well the integration goes and the expansion of splashblog to include more device types.
Funny thing though: if you visit SplashBlog right now – nearly all the recent photos are straight-up professional porn copied from other sites.
IPO?
Looks like they announced it on the 13th.
As far as I know it was not to be announced until 12am this morning – I noticed some news agencies got it out early plus there were the earlier rumors.
Speaking of Business Blogging, this interview I conducted with Anil Dash may be of some interest.
Raised $23 million – wow, that’s a huge amount of money for a VC to invest.
The venture capitalist will require some where around 6x their invest in 5 years.
Will Six Apart really be able to payback their investors approx. $138 million five years from now ($23M * 6)?
They better have something huge in the works.
I wonder if SixApart isn’t setting itself up for a fall by taking so much funding? Like George M said, I’m assuming VCs are going to want a large 6-10x return in 5-7 years, and that’s going to be hard to do by any measure. It’s already so easy to set up blogging tools for free, so where is the (huge) revenue potential?
What is with the grammar errors? “SixApart have a lot more growing to do…” With such a huge readership I’d think you’d atleast proof before posting.
The eJamming post has an error as well “I’m particularly interesting in how eJamming handles latency issues. They discuss the issue”
A question for Mike and all those famaliar with raising venture capital. Companies of all sizes and quality seem to be raising some big bucks. So my question is how easy is it to raise venture capital for a startup in the US or is it a case of more who you know.
I am curious what multipliers/valuation was used for this round. Does anyone have any SixApart metrics to share? Number of users, revenue, headcount, etc?