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December 13, 2007

NewsGator Gets $12 Million

Nick Gonzalez

33 comments »

newsgator_logo.pngMakers of the desktop RSS reader, NewsGator, have raised a $12 million led by a new investor, Vista Ventures, and supported by existing investors Mobius, Venture Capital, and Masthead Venture Partners. This brings the total raised by NewsGator to $30 million over three rounds.

Their RSS reader has been a personal favorite of the TechCrunch team. I use it over Google reader, which can lag behind in keeping my feeds up to date. They also have a mobile version.

Although we know the company best for the reader, NewsGator has also developed several other RSS related products. They have enterprise servers for syndicating information from the web to your employees, their own widget framework, and a host of personal products. Readers considering enterprise syndication services should check out our coverage of Attensa too.

Update: NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston adds:

Over 1 million folks rely on NewsGator daily – whether through FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, our mobile applications, our enterprise server at 12 of the Fortune 100 (and many more companies), or readers of over 50 sites who work with our content and widgets (USA Today, CBS News, etc etc).

He confirms that NewsGator’s main sources of revenues come from licensing its software to enterprises and monthly service fees from media and consumer-products companies. The new investment will go towards strengthening its position “in the enterprise RSS space,” and he expects this will get the company to a breakeven point on profits.

CrunchBase Information
NewsGator
Information provided by CrunchBase
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 5:00 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. Marek

    December 13th, 2007 at 5:13 am

    Which is better on your opinion, NewsGator or NetVibes?

  2. MF

    December 13th, 2007 at 5:23 am

    I notice the plug from the Techcrunch team for Newsgator. Have you reviewed a great new reader from FeedEachother.com? Superb.

  3. Prashant

    December 13th, 2007 at 5:26 am

    please correct the link in Crunchbase

  4. rss123

    December 13th, 2007 at 5:38 am

    NewsGator products have been useful indeed.

  5. Thomas M

    December 13th, 2007 at 5:48 am

    I simply love their Syncing abilities, I purchased FeedDemon for my work and home computers and then use their Newsgator Go for catching up with odd items on my BB. I just can’t get over how well the system works and I look forward to seeing what they do in the future.

  6. Florin

    December 13th, 2007 at 5:55 am

    nice :)

  7. Pam

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:13 am

    They have definitely helped improve the user RSS experience. I personally use it to RSS all my contents and I am also going to check out their mobile version.

  8. How To Blog

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:19 am

    Not bad for site like that, 12Millions I guess somebody will get rich soon, i still prefer NetVibes have more web2.0 in it.

  9. js

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:20 am

    Has their online RSS reader caught up to Google and Bloglines? It seems perennially stuck in beta, and a couple of months ago, it was so buggy it seemed more like alpha.

    I know their desktop RSS reader is the bee’s knees, but the trend is toward online readers.

  10. Steve Ballmer

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:21 am

    Seperate RSS apps are on the way out, this is now being rolled into browsers and email clients. This will turn out to be a bad investment!

  11. Pito Salas

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:24 am

    Hey Nick, it’s been quite a while since you looked at BlogBridge (see http://www.techcrunch.com/2005.....ss-reader/).

    Yeah, we’re still at it :) but really, it’s come a long long way since then (see http://www.blogbridge.com/prod.....sual-tour/) so I was wondering if you’d like to take another look???

    It’s still free, cross-platform (Mac, Windows and Linux) and Open Source and a very credible alternative to Newsgator.

  12. Mike

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:52 am

    EasyByte RSS Server:

    http://www.easybyte.com/produc.....serss.html

    has much more functionality than the NewsGator offereing, and is available today!

  13. pancreaticcancerchemotherapy

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:58 am

    It is a functional and innovating product, mainly the mobile version. They develop very good applications.

  14. Andy

    December 13th, 2007 at 7:17 am

    I think i prefer NetVibes. Its easy to use and does the job. Its tempting to keep switching everytime I hear about some new tool or app but my day just goes if I start messing around with something that isnt broken!

  15. rss123

    December 13th, 2007 at 7:23 am

    Desktop rss readers do provide a better user experience, but no adsense
    type of advertising revenue possible, still — when is this going to change?

    On the other hand, web-based rss readers do have a future.. particularly
    if the adsense ads are generally allowed to open in a new window, for
    example, as what Gmail themselves have been doing (click on an adsense
    ad will open the ad in new window, which is not generally allowed to the
    long tail publishers.)

    The lack of the general capability to open adsense ads in a new window
    has been holding us back from launching our online rss reader, as it
    provides a pretty lousy user experience. Proof — why don’t the adsense
    ads in Gmail opens in the same window, for example.

    That said, this is going to change presumably very soon… according to
    China Google’s (official) adsense blog, starting TODAY, the adsense ads
    will open in a new window, which is a very important user-experience
    improvement: http://adsense.googlechinablog.....sense.html

    Accoding to that official post, it says “a VERY IMPORTANT function” — YES,
    VERY, VERY IMPORTANT… /ac.

  16. Thomas

    December 13th, 2007 at 7:54 am

    @Mike: Can you give a feature-by-feature comparison of easybyte and newsgator to evaluate the claim, “has much more functionality than the NewsGator offereing [sic]”?

    We a Fotune 100 Co. are looking for a solution for internal purposes.

    thanks,
    Thomas

  17. Adam

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:09 am

    Apparently, rss123 does not know (and hopes users do not know) about AdblockPlus. Eventually, funding will come to market AdblockPlus directly to consumers and the marketers will have a serious dilemma. I hope that risk is stated in anyone’s business plan that depends on adverts.

  18. ITrush

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:11 am

    We all have our own favorites and it just so happen that mine is NewsGator!

    Nhick
    http://www.itrush.com

  19. oyunlar

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    oh my gat very nice thanks

  20. rick

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:52 am

    how can that investment possibly pay off? $30 million, for an enterprise software play? (That’s where all their revenue comes from, right?) On what, a couple million per year? There’s NO WAY the market for “syndicating information from the web to your employees” is worth more than $50 mil. Total Market! You might be able to flog some shelfware, but cmon, what’s the business need? Plus where are the exits? Who’s going to buy you? CA?!

    To raise a $13mil C round you’ve got to be able to pretend you’re going to do $100mil in revenue soon. So what story could these guys possibly tell that new investor so convincingly? I just. don’t. get it.

  21. rss123

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:57 am

    AdblockPlus is also great, but don’t forget the (Eric Schmidt’s?) word of, don’t fight the Internet… and, nobody will fund any adblocker — or, give me a solid example of exception… sure bizplans fail.. the late edgeio failed.. but http://www.olx.com doing well… also based on adverts — in fact, adsense adverts.

  22. rss123

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:01 am

    @rick, the obvious exit is by [of course, hoping that] somebody acquiring them sooner or later.. say msft or goog.. for $100m or $200m or whatnot (depending on the backing vc’s strength).. when skype or youtube or feedburner or even myspace got acquired, how much revenue did they have..

  23. petfiles

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    Incredible how a software that simple can raise (and probably earn) so much money!

  24. rss123

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:40 am

    Another proof that the open source movement kills not a good software company, nor will webtop software replace good desktop software.

  25. Derek Scruggs

    December 13th, 2007 at 4:09 pm

    I knew them when… Greg Reinacker started the company as a plug-in for Outlook. I remember talking to him a few years back when it was just him and I think a PT programmer. Good to see how far they’ve come.

  26. gamblert

    December 13th, 2007 at 6:28 pm

    Win money by sharing original pictures, movies and audio!

    http://www.spymac.com/details/?2317061

  27. Mike

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:32 am

    In answer to Thomas, please fill out the Contact form on http://www.EasByte.com
    website and we can setup a trial for you and talk you though our product?

    You will rapidly realise our RSS Server is very easy to install and administer (less than 5 mins) and have many more features than the NewsGator offering.

    We look forward to setting up a trial of our RSS Server for you.

    Regards

    EasyByte Support

  28. Andrew

    December 14th, 2007 at 11:40 am

    Rick, they have 400,000 licensed users of their enterprise server. I’m not sure the pricing of the enterprise server, but their hosted version is $99/year/user. Even if the non-hosted is half that, that’s $20mm/year alone from that product.

    You significantly underestimate the size of the business market. It’s huge, and they have tons of room for growth.

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