Bitly Lands $15 Mil For Expansion
Link-shortening service Bitly on Tuesday announced raising $15 million in new funding led by Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures. The company said it will use the additional capital to hire staff and
expand its social Web products.
Bitly launched a revamped Web site in May with the aim of becoming a broader social bookmarking hub built around saving and sharing links it calls
“bitmarks.”
Through the site, people can organize these bitmarks into bundles around certain topics, search and filter them, share them via Facebook and Twitter, and make
them public or private.
As a result of the upgrade, the company said it’s already seen daily registrations increase by 300% since relaunching. “At Bitly our vision is to be the
primary online service for sharing and discovering interesting content,” it stated.
Reports at the time of the relaunch, however, highlighted a backlash to the new design
because of the departure from its roots as a simple utility for shortening links. Bitly CEO Peter Stern told AllThingsD the site has added 200,000 registered users in the last month as it now offers a
more mainstream service.
Even with a growing user base, though, the company has no plans to add advertising. It continues to charge business users to make money. With the latest
investment, Bitly has raised a total of $28.5 million to date. Participating in the round with Khosla were prior investors RRE Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
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