Twitter has closed their third round of financing, says Om Malik. He pegs it at a $15 million raise at around an $80 million valuation, but doesn’t know the investor. We (and others I’m sure) have been tracking the same story, and it’s pretty clear the new investor is Spark Capital.
A source says Twitter signed a term sheet with Spark Capital a couple of weeks ago, and Spark partner Bijan Sabet was in San Francisco today visiting “a very special company.” Other hints on Twitter: cofounder Evan Williams remarked that he was walking down Newberry Street in Boston late last month - my guess is he walked right into the building at 137.
Spark Capital also tends to work closely with Union Square Ventures, one of the existing investors in Twitter. See the investors, for example, in Tumblr, Covestor and Bug Labs.
Nothing is confirmed yet by the company, but I suspect it will be shortly. And it certainly explains the good mood they’ve been in lately, despite the increased downtime (see update here).
Great, congrats.. hoping less downtime now given more resources to do it right..
That buys a lot of servers! Until then we have to settle for this:
http://whentwitterisdown.com/
Mike you have to get some sleep and take some pills. Things will get worst if you keep attacking twitter. You suffer powerful Twitter addiction.
Glad to see VCs fighting over a company with no business model, an indiscernible market and a broken product.
Twitter closed on $15M today and yet some folks actually bought these dudes pizza because they felt sorry for them.
Seriously.
And as a point of reference, I’m very bullish on Web 2.0.
Twitter is my in-home water cooler (not to mention a whole bunch of other uses too) - hopefully the money will help to further secure its future uptime.
Barbara
To be totally honest, Twitter has been loosing its focus a lot recently. This application was definitely not built to be scalable. As soon as the usage explosion, sending a single Tweet via the API they provide literally takes several minutes.
Really hope that they start to evaluate their future, and rethink.
Oh and how do you reckon they’ll monetise their service (as pointed out in one of the FAQs)?
At $80,000,000 you’d think they’d be making at least a few ad bucks but no….welcome to Bubble 2
Thanks to Adobe, any reasonably sophisticated infrastructure engineer can now whip up a massively scalable, highly redundant version of Twitter using Flash 10’s P2P layer.
DOH!
http://evolvingtrends.wordpres.....-flash-10/
80 million for “facebook updates” on another domain.
80 million and no one knows why they can’t keep it up: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/0.....n-all.html
“We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening.”
Read that last sentence again. I bet their VC’s are high fiving each other as we type.
Maybe now they can upgrade their system so they won’t be down so often!
Twitter raised $5 million for a $20 million valuation last summer. The company still hasn’t found a business model, mostly because users, by and large, view Twitter messages on cell phones or third-party desktop applications, not the Twitter.com website.
Wow…until now I’ve been sure that they wouldn’t be able to raise another round (citing their current lack of a profitable model and the horrendously inevitable flaws that go with implementing a business model to make this an actual ‘business’). Either I’m right-on-money with this (sorry) or I’m about to be dumbfounded by someone wanting to acquire a company that operates at a constant loss. Seems you don’t need to make
any attempt to make profits to be classified as a business these days.
good.
http://gamepver.com
I know Twitter is supposed to be a really cool site but I just never saw the appeal…
That is great for Twitter, hopefully they can get their service to be more stable before everyone jumps ship for Friendfeed or some other service that can actually stay up.
Other Highly Likely Rumor: Twitter to Close Servers.
what’s with all the outages!
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