Flock, the so-called “social browser” built on top of Mozilla technology, has raised $15 million in a Series D round led by Fidelity Ventures and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures.
The round (the company’s biggest) more than doubles its total to over $28 million, an amount that has been gradually raised over the past three years even though Flock 1.0 launched only this past November.
CEO Shawn Hardin speaks about Flock’s mission in very sweeping terms: enabling users to express themselves, participate in online communities, have voices, and engage their peers. As he sees it, the web is experiencing a paradigm shift from consumption to participation, and it needs a new type of browser to go along with that shift.
Flock is basically a suite of browser extensions with ties into web services like Facebook and Twitter. A personalized homepage called MyWorld and a special sidebar serve as feed readers and friend update aggregators. You’re given quick access to Gmail and Yahoo webmail accounts and any blogs that you administer. And a media bar along the top makes for quick searching on Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites.
When asked whether regular browser extensions pose much competition for Flock, Hardin suggests that very few people actually enjoy personalizing things enough to set up the breadth of functionality provided by Flock. Plus, Flock already has a proven revenue model where these do not; it earns money the same way Mozilla does, through search placement deals with the engines (Yahoo and a few others in Flock’s case).
Almost 4 million people have downloaded Flock, and users are said to use it for over 4 hours per day on average.
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So 43 million for a basic browser extension?
What’s Flock’s business model again? Those VCs must have invested based on some good story. What’s the story?
I think somebody entered it in the CrunchBase database twice.
Why did they take on so much money? Its just going to make an exit even harder, especially for a company that isn’t making money yet.
Flock raised $28 million! how much left to the founders? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/jM0AaIOXKv_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Flock raised $28 million! how much left to the founders? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/AxQpd55xNO”}}}
Completely insane!
I’m one of those 4 million who have downloaded Flock. Used it once, it has nothing, nothing, going on over Firefox, and never have given a second look and probably never will.
When will Flock disclose actual users numbers
Downloads are mostly meaningless without understanding their particular fall-off after the download.
They must have this information if they can talk about how many hours a day their users average. Not disclosing it means it’s probably not very good.
What’s your guess? Mine is >500K users.
Loic: You are correct. Who really needs 43 MILLION for another web browser? I like Safari, and I am fine with that.
I’ve been a Flock user for some time now. I like the social features that it has built in, but the reason I use it is because it doesn’t crash every time I open multiple tabs like Firefox does (did).
Nice.., but, one more browser to install?..
@Loic, thanks for looking out for us founders! A couple of things. First, as the article notes, the round was $15 Million, not $43 or $28. Second, WRT founders, dilution sucks, but not as much as going for a long drive on short pier! I am actually no longer with Flock, but am very happy to know that despite the dilution, the current team will have enough runway to execute in an uncertain funding environment. Plus, the product keeps getting better and the model refined so I am holding out for a smaller piece of what I believe can be a much bigger pie (if the team continues to execute as well as they have).
i dig flock but the browser on my mac crashes alll the time - especially when any type of flash video tries to start up. force quitting has become a habit and then i resort to using safari. flock me it’s frustrating.
Exactly how much money have these guys made?
The mistake about the total funding has been corrected! But there is an other one: our office is no longer in Mountain View, but in Redwood City.
@7 i reckon less than 200k users
I use flock as my primary web browser. I like it’s social networking side bar but I don’t so much like that the default browser is yahoo instead of google.
Ivory: Glad you like the People sidebar. You can change the default search engine by clicking “search preferences” at the bottom of the search toolbar flyout menu. Cheers
I think flock main exit model is to sell itself to Google or Microsoft, or maybe Yahoo.
I switched from Firefox to Flock last year and within a day swore never to go back to Firefox. Its much more than just a skin and browser add ons. It actually runs faster, has fewer memory leaks and is great if you regularly upload photos, blog or check facebook.
Also - its media browser for photos and videos (looks like iTunes album browser) is an amazing lesser known feature.
Flock is a good looking browser. I bet they do earn like any other web browser, sponsored search, etc
So right now for a 10x, they have to sell Flock for about $300 million? Unless of course you can see them monetizing your tabs; I’ve personally found Flock to be really processor-intensive and with all of the crazy extensions going on, it just seemed to bog down my computer.
If they were able to stabilize these newest versions on par with Firefox 3, I’d definitely be interested in giving it a try again, but until then, my 2GB of ram can’t even take it.
I tried Flock, but franckly I do not see the point in installing one more browser to get (not even all the) functionnalities that an add-on such as the beta release of yoono is providing for Firefox…
Moreover, not all Firefox add-ons work with Flock, why would I give up all of these ?
$28M for one more browser ? come on !
@Loic: your comment comforted me in my opinion that Seesmic is not suited for blog comments (and is it really for conversations ?).
I spent 1:35 to watch you say: “how much is left to the founders”, which I could have read in 10s. I am glad that all comments are not Seesmic or it would require 30 minutes to “read” this page…
Hey folks,
Thanks for your interest in Flock! A couple of answers below…
Re: Business model: We make money the same way most browsers do, through our search widget. We have a deal with Yahoo! just like Mozilla has a deal with Google. We also have several other streams that are currently contributing to revenue.
@Mike Hardgreaves: Sorry to hear that you didn’t like Flock when you tried it. I encourage you to give it another try (we’ve done a lot in the last few months and years) and if you still don’t like it, please drop me a line. We’re always working to make Flock better, and your feedback truly helps!
@Daniel: As a few folks have mentioned, we got $15 Million in funding in this round, not $48 million. That was a CrunchBase error which seems to be fixed now.
@duncans doughnuts: Sorry to hear about the crashes; this is NOT normal behavior. Flock is generally as stable as Firefox 2.x. Feel free to email me at the address below and we’ll work to hunt down your issue.
@MyMesh.com: Yes, it’s another browser download, but it can be your last browser download. One of the best things about Flock is that our powerful social features are built on top of the Gecko platform that powers Firefox, so you’ll always have the functionality, security, and power of Firefox. We’ll be releasing a version of Flock based on the Firefox3 codebase later this year, and all security updates are integrated into Flock in a very short time period.
@Andrew Wise: As I mentioned above, we have a version based on Firefox3 coming out later this year, which includes all the wonderful stability and performance of Gecko 1.9.
@Peter Flitsch: What’s great about Flock is how our features all interact with each other, instead of being stuck in a single sidebar. You can send articles directly from our Feed Reader to our Blog Editor, send Flickr photos directly from a page to a Gmail message, or drag’n'drop a YouTube video from the MediaBar to a Facebook friend in the People sidebar. Everything works together to create a single, solid experience rather than an experience entirely stuck within an extension. Additionally, since we’re built off of Firefox we are not expending cycles trying to build or enhance the core rendering/browsing; we’re building fantastic tools that hook into this to provide a complete social browsing experience.
Thanks for all the great comments, folks!
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
no insane. Flock is a very good social WB. I use it as FFox: one for surfing global, and one for all my social networks, flickr, Facebook, Dailymotion, netvibes, google doc, etc.
I can’t see the average social website user switching to Flock since they haven’t even switched from IE to Firefox yet. Good luck trying to gain marketshare with a new browser.
Flock is the best browser out there, ESPECIALLY for the average user. It never never crashes stupid Vista like both IE and Firefox did. I’m on it all day, every day. Can’t wait to see the upgrades.
thanks
I thenk that too