Socialcast, a social communication SaaS provider for enterprises, has secured $1.4 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and angel investors. True Ventures led the round with $1 million and angel investors contributed $400,000. Socialcast was a finalist for the 2009 Crunchies Award for “Best Bootstrapped Startup.”
Om Malik, the founder of tech blogging network GigaOm and venture partner at True Ventures, will be joining Socialcast’s board of directors. On Malik joined True Ventures last September. Socialcast is Malik’s first investment at True Ventures and his first board appointment as a partner at the VC firm.
Founded by Tim Young, Socialcast is a communication tool businesses can use to incorporate social networking with messaging to share knowledge across enterprises. Socialcast’s software (for $1 per user per month) combines social bookmarking features, Twitter-like microblogging and FriendFeed-like streaming into one platform. And the software integrates with other social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. Socialcast can also import activity from your iPhone, Gmail account and YouTube. And all of this activity is private, making Socialcast an ideal program for real-time, internal communication within businesses. Yammer, a winner at last year’s TechCrunch 50, is a similar Twitter-like microblogging and communication platform for businesses that has gained popularity.
Congratson the funding. Sounds like a good setup and sice they won the Crunchies for best bootstrapped startup I guess they’ll spend the $$ wisely.
This is a very interesting to see businesses to begin to adopt social networking tools and use them to increase productivity within the workforce. Most people I know that use such tools do so to kill time because they hate their job.
On the other hand, I can see how such tools could be used to keep track of employees, make sure everyone is on the same page, and help ensure targeted goals are accomplished.
Hey this thing is good: finding the “best bootstrapped” start up of the time…I wanna know more about this, coz I want to send in entry about my own startup “http://latticepurple.com” too…
any clues anyone?
cheers,
marvin
I cannot agree more, actually I wrote a similar post weeks ago
Edward
Frontier Blog – No one ahead, no one behind
http://www.hwswworld.com/wp
Love the gratuitous Yammer plug at the end of the article. Conflict-of-interest FTW!
How does it punch through firewalls and ISA? Facebook and Youtube are blocked on our enterprise network.
It’s going to be interesting who will lead in the space. CubeTree (http://www.cubetree.com/) is also off to a good start.
Very good, thanks for the link Sasha
Good post, thanks for the info.