Twitter Gets Another Round of Founding: Raises $35 Million

Written by Frederic Lardinois / February 13, 2009 11:35 AM / 11 Comments

Twitter just announced that it has received another round of funding. According to TechCrunch, Twitter raised a total of $35 million in this round, which was led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners. Altogether, Twitter has now raised a total of $55 million. According to Biz Stone, Twitter wasn't actively courting new investments, as the company still had enough money in the bank, but given Twitter's current growth, the company decided to accept the offer.

While Twitter is growing into a very popular service, and slowly becoming mainstream in the process, its monetization strategy still remains a mystery, though the company must have some plans that obviously convinced a group of savvy venture capitalists to invest even more into the company to facilitate faster growth.

In the announcement, Biz Stone says that Twitter is now in a position to "begin building revenue-generating products." Twitter also expects to grow its team in the next year.

Web vs. API

One interesting (though not unexpected) statistic in the funding announcement is that Twitter now gets almost twice as much traffic from its API than from the web. That number will surely drive how Twitter plans to monetize its service. If only a few people come to Twitter's web site, then just putting advertising on the site will not drive enough income to Twitter to keep the service afloat in the long run.

Twitter also announced that it grew 900% in the last year.

Comments

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The word on the street is that Twitter is absolutely the way to go for business networking, politics and causes.

The only talk out the left cheek I hear is about whether or not they can sustain the digital security as they mature. There has been a breech and we are watching.

Otherwise, great tool. LOVE IT!

http://justaskgemalto.com

Posted by: Janet Altman | February 13, 2009 12:18 PM

unbelievable that there are people crazy enough to keep throwing money at these guys. I mean, I love Twitter, but they are up over $50m in total funding now. Yet, they have made now significant advances in well over a year.

I really hope this was a move to help the founders cash out a bit and not a move to raise more spending money. Otherwise they'll have to have a $500m cash exit just to keep everyone happy.

Posted by: Jeff | February 13, 2009 12:33 PM

thanks you..

Posted by: parça kontör | February 13, 2009 1:46 PM

Waiting for these guy to drop the other shoe is intense :) First I wondered if they had a plan? Now we know, so what's the plan. I hope it's something really inovative that will help other startups monetize their idea. Go Twitter!

Posted by: Jonas | February 13, 2009 3:15 PM

Twitter is certainly getting a lot of cash thrown at it. These investors will want there money back one day with interest. How does Twitter intend to do that? I don't think anyone really has a clue.

Posted by: Michael McGimpsey | February 13, 2009 7:22 PM

http://www.gardenyacicek.com

Posted by: cicek | February 13, 2009 8:13 PM

Misspelled title.

It should read funding and not founding.

Posted by: kat | February 14, 2009 11:55 AM

I firmly believe Twitter's key to monetary success is through their search. I'm using it more and more for product and service research. Now if they just enabled a system like AdWords where advertisers could purchase ads beside the Twitter search results they'd be getting somewhere. Same thing goes for Facebook and their monetization woes. The key is targeted advertising based on keyword searches. This is where advertisers will get their ROI.

Posted by: Scott | February 14, 2009 4:04 PM