• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 4, 2016

Spot.IM has closed a Series A funding round worth $13 million to build out its platform. The technology gives visitors to sites like News Corp and Time the ability to leave comments and interact with others reading the same article in real time.

Think of a hyped-up Microsoft Skype or Google Chat in Gmail, where two or more people can write a comment and interact with each other about the context of the article. 

That insight from social interactions such as Facebook Likes and Shares provides fodder to target ads alongside the articles and comments, said Spot.IM CEO Nadav Shoval. "On some publisher sites we collect more than one million social-like events per day," he said.

Shoval wants to "save the publishing industry," though it might sound "illogical," he said. Publishers that use Spot.IM, he said, see an increase on average of 17% in page views and 20% of time on site.

Index Ventures, AltaIR, and Millhouse Capital are among the investors in this funding round, along with James Hilton, CEO of M&C Saatchi Mobile; Avishai Abrahami, co-founder and CEO of Wix; Giora Kaplan, co-founder and CTO of Wix; Nir Zohar, president and COO of Wix; Brian Bedol; and Ran Tushia.

Spot.IM will use the funds to "further disrupt" the online publishing industry and drive growth through new hires as well as expanding research and development to build out capabilities that further foster social interactions on publisher sites.