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Twitter's Bankroll Revealed

Written by Josh Catone / December 10, 2007 11:15 AM / 2 Comments

In July of this year, online presence and social communications app Twitter announced that it had taken a Series B funding round from Union Square Ventures. At the time, USV wrote excitedly about the investment, even though they "don't yet know" what sort of business model can exist around the service.

One thing neither party disclosed was the size of the round. PE Hub reports today that a regulatory filing reveals that Twitter has raised $4.8 million of a $5.4 million round. Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, and Charles River Ventures are also investors in the site.

Perhaps no other small company has caused as much commotion as Twitter this year. Since it exploded on to the scene at SXSW last March (that's not when the service debuted, but when it finally found its audience), Twitter has been running away with headlines all year and their growth has been impressive.

Arguably one of the most important things Twitter has done is open up an API to outside developers (this is an argument that co-founder Biz Stone made to us in September). According to Twitter, the API has seen such incredible growth, that just months after it was released it is already getting 10 times the traffic of the Twitter web site.

One of Twitter's cheif rivals, Jaiku, was acquired by Google in October.

Comments

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  1. Methinks the Twitter model is build vast and contented user base (us) then let you send a fixed number of free tweets, but if you're a heavy user, a business built on Twitter, job search, latest deal guide etc - then you start to charge. It's all in the numbers! No ad's here pretty please.

    We currently experimenting with business and marketing models based around Twitter, whilst the tweets are still free to roam the nest.

    Posted by: Adam Martin {Fat Man} | December 11, 2007 6:52 AM



  2. @Adam: if twitter decide to go with 'fixed number of free tweets' their service will die and everyone will run away from it, me thinks.
    i'm sure they'll think of something smarter that will allow them to keep the current user base but to also profit from some 'business' usage for which there certainly are opportunities

    Posted by: Esdee | December 11, 2007 2:03 PM



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