we’re flush now

At Sphere we want to completely change how people search and discover blogs. We started sphere by raising a small angel round last Spring some angel investors with halos — Doug Mackenzie, David Mahoney, Kevin Compton, Mike Winton, Phil Black, Vince Vannelli and Will Hearst. We worked like crazy over the summer to build an algorithm that helps readers more easily discover great blog content — and perhaps inspire more people to read blogs and maybe even become bloggers. It’s a simple idea but very hard to do.

The feedback from our beta launch gave us a lot of confidence that we’re on the right path so we decided recently to raise $3.75 million from a select group of partners. Our core group of investors are joined by new investors Trident Capital, Hearst Publishing and Scott Kurnit. We’re very psyched about this group, a mixture of individuals and firms with deep passion to build great, ground breaking consumer technology companies.

We’re very fortunate to have an A+ team around the table. Our investors are complemented by the talents of four advisors starting with our cofounder Toni Schneider along with Mary Hodder, Matt Mullenweg and Scott Kurnit – an exceptional crew to save us from ourselves from time to time.

The growth of the blogosphere has outpaced anyone’s expectations. With this financing, we’re in position to provide bloggers and blog readers with a great blog search/ discovery experience. We’re using the money to build a rock solid infrastrucutre, add features that people want and need (check out our custom range searches, related media, featured blogs and sphere it bookmarklet – all of which, I dare say, are great stuff) and hire a few very talented biz dev and engineering rockstars.

Stay tuned as we get ready to go live.

Posted by Tony