News

Bit.ly Gains $10 Million In Venture Funding

Alison Diana

URL shortening company gets Series B capital and a board member from new investor RRE Ventures.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta Revealed
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta Revealed
(click image for larger view and for full photo gallery)
The string of numbers is longer in the bank account of URL abbreviator bit.ly, after the company on Thursday completed $10 million in Series B funding.

RRE Ventures led the financing, and general partner Eric Wiesen will join bit.ly's board. AOL Ventures also participated in the round of funding, joining existing investors such as OATV, Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg, David Shen, and betaworks.


More Storage Insights

Webcasts

More >>

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

"In 2009, bit.ly grew like crazy and started offering more ways to share and manage links (i.e. with the launch of tools like our popular sharing bookmarklet)," said John Borthwick, bit.ly CEO, in a company blog. "In 2010, bit.ly has become the most successful platform for publishers and enterprises to track engagement using their own branded short URLs."

To date, users have clicked bit.ly links more than 40.6 billion times and have shortened more than 4 billion unique URLs, according to the company. On Oct. 5, users created the most bit.ly links in the company's history, Borthwick said.

For August 2010, bit.ly was the 69th most-visited website, according to Google Doubleclick ad planner.

Earlier this year, bit.ly unveiled a white-label service and now has more than 3,000 large customers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, National Public Radio, and Pepsi. In addition, the company works with many small clients, including individuals who want their own custom URL service, said Borthwick.

"Bit.ly pro URLs now represent 7% of all the URLs circulating in the social/real-time web," he said.

The company did not address what it will use the funding for.

"We work hard every day to deliver a great service to users -- this new investment will give us the opportunity to do that even better," Borthwick said.

See the latest collaboration tools and technologies at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara's comprehensive conference and expo. It happens Nov. 8-11, 2010, in Santa Clara, Calif. Find out more.

Related Reading


Informationweek Discussions

Start the Discussion


InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links