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September 6, 2006

Six Apart Acquires Rojo

Michael Arrington

60 comments »

Blogging platform company Six Apart will announce this morning that it has acquired Rojo, a feed reader and search engine that competes with Bloglines and other companies.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but our assumption was that this a less than $5 million deal. Six Apart is not planning on continuing to build out the core Rojo products. In the press release (sorry no link available yet), Six Apart says “Six Apart intends to sell a majority interest in Rojo’s newsreader services in the coming months,” meaning they will become a minority stockholder of the service. Rojo founder and CEO Chris Alden and CTO Aaron Emigh will joining Six Apart’s executive team.

This deal brings to a close the long saga of the Rojo story. The company was founded in June 2003, launched in October 2004 and had a stellar team of investors including TPG Ventures, BV Capital, Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo consistently released excellent products and has a loyal core user base. Rojo had a promising start and its userbase continued to grow gradually. But the crowded and highly competitive feed reader space, dominated by Bloglines, Newsgator and others, was a tough playground to hang out in. My hope is that the Rojo product continues to iterate, it’s one of my favorite websites.

Our previous coverage of Six Apart is here, and Rojo is here. We also had a very lively discussion with executives from a number of feed readers, including Chris Alden from Rojo, in a TalkCrunch podcast a couple of months ago.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 8:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Startups.in/India

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:05 am

    Buy Rojo for

  2. Startups.in/India

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:08 am

    Hmmn..seems like all the text after the less than “sign” gets truncated. something you folks might want to check.

    Buy Rojo for less than $5mil and sell the majority interest!!! But why?

  3. Rick

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:13 am

    How many years will they need before recovering this $5 million investment listing blog RSS?

  4. Frank Gruber

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:14 am

    Wow! Congrats to Chris Alden and Co. I am a big fan of Rojo - it has the mojo!

  5. Sean Ammirati

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:20 am

    Any insight into what is going to happen with the FeedShare service?

  6. jason S

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:46 am

    Wow, that was not a successful exit for the initial investors. Does anyone know how much funding the company got? If they have been operating for 3 years my guess is that they got more funding than the price they were actually acquired for.

  7. sam

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:48 am

    it would be interesting to know the initial funding…

  8. Uma

    September 6th, 2006 at 9:00 am

    At the same day…

    NewsAlloy goes down; New beginning or bitter end?
    http://www.downloadsquad.com/2.....itter-end/

  9. jason S

    September 6th, 2006 at 9:20 am

    From OM:
    Rojo had raised over $3.5 million in funding from TPG Ventures, BV Capital, Marc Andreessen, and Ron Conway, among others,

  10. Michael

    September 6th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    This is was the beginning of the weening of many web 2.0 firms (of course far from all!!!) , I fear TechCrunch may become the new Fucked Company.com newsite!!!!

  11. Chris Alden

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:31 am

    Thanks for the coverage Mike. Just to be clear, while this brings an end to the “long saga” of Rojo the company (I guess three years passes for “long” in Internet time!), be assured that Rojo.com the service — and NooZ.com and our weekly newsletter — are living on and moving forward. I will continue to be involved with Rojo but am also really excited to work with Six Apart and Movable Type. In fact, I think a big story that is being missed here is Six Apart’s commitment to Movable Type and core technologies.

  12. Patrick Grote

    September 6th, 2006 at 11:11 am

    It looks like Six Apart wanted the people more than the product. Makes sense.

  13. NJG from NYC

    September 6th, 2006 at 11:17 am

    In fact, I think a big story that is being missed here is Six Apart’s commitment to Movable Type and core technologies.

    Why is that? Is there any reason to think that they would not remain committed to their core product?

  14. andy

    September 6th, 2006 at 12:34 pm

    your link to Rojo’s previous coverage points to 6A’s previous coverage.

    http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/rojo perhaps?

  15. Randy Charles Morin

    September 6th, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    Typo. Broken link on anchor “Rojo is here”

  16. pwb

    September 6th, 2006 at 12:47 pm

    Wow! At

  17. Craig Danuloff

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:09 pm

    Great. Something else to distract them from actually improving MovableType.

  18. jon

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:47 pm

    another thing that sixapart will make worse.
    cough*livejournal*cough

  19. sam

    September 6th, 2006 at 2:32 pm

    >>another thing that sixapart will make worse.
    >>cough*livejournal*cough

    wash your hands after that cough!!!!!

  20. Modern Day Alchemist

    September 6th, 2006 at 3:16 pm

    I guess Six Apart didn’t want to spend the time building out their own product or maybe they just wanted to bolster their executive team.

  21. Norman David Gerre

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:48 pm

    jon: interesting that you should say that, since I’d always thought that one of the major reasons for buying Danga (LiveJournal) was to get Brad Fitzpatrick and his experience building massively scalable Perl/MySQL systems. IIRC TypePad was having some growing pains at the time.

    If LiveJournal hadn’t already been profitable, who knows? Maybe they would’ve sold that off too…

  22. GorillaSushi

    September 7th, 2006 at 2:46 am

    So we should expect to see Rojo flooded with flash banner ads and pop-ups now right? Rojo is my preferred reader right now but if Six-Apart tries to squeeze a profit out by assaulting the user with ads, I may have to make a switch.

  23. cvander

    September 9th, 2006 at 6:30 am

    I hope they don’t do changes adding more ads.. or i’m done with them and checking the next newsreader.

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