Twitter raked in $200 million in funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and others. The investment round will help Twitter build out its business.
Twitter banked $200 million in funding led by Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers and others, a major investment round that values
the company at $3.7 billion.
The move comes more than a year after Twitter received an
infusion of $50 million that valued the company at $1 billion. The
startup, which has let its 175 million users post 25 billion messages
of 140 characters or less in 2010, has raised nearly $360 million since
its launch in 2007.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo confirmed the new cash infusion in
a brief
blog post Dec. 15, adding that Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt had
joined Twitter's board of directors. Rosenblatt was DoubleClick's CEO when Google
acquired it in 2008 to bolster its display ad business.
Costolo said Twitter would use the money to help "us
continue to grow as a company and as a business" but declined to be more
specific.
Twitter will use the cash to bolster its
fledgling advertising business and bring its messaging capability
to more businesses.
That means hiring more people to develop products and perhaps
hitting the streets to reach out to local businesses for ad purposes.
Having Rosenblatt on hand
to advise Twitter's leadership in advertising potential should be a big
help in the latter regard.
Twitter Dec. 15 also revamped its Business.twitter.com Website
to help businesses not only use Twitter, but how to advertise themselves on the popular service.
Business.twitter.com features a section about Twitter's ad products, covering
Promoted Trends, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Tweets.
There are also case studies on how Best Buys and JetBlue
use Twitter to market themselves, and ways to contact Twitter for advertising possibilities
Many analysts see an IPO in Twitter's future provided
it does not sell to a larger company such as Google or Facebook.
Under Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams, who ceded his CEO
post to Costolo to helm product development, there is little evidence this will
happen.
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