SAN FRANCISCO, May 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Sprout, the premier platform for
easily creating, publishing and managing rich media Web content, has closed
a $5 million Series B financing led by Polaris Venture Partners. Mike
Hirshland, general partner at Polaris, has joined Sprout's board of
directors. Existing investor Global Venture Capital (gvc) and legendary
entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and
designer of Lotus 1-2-3, also participated in the round.
Sprout is a free Web-based authoring platform that enables anyone to
quickly and easily build widgets, mashups, mini-sites, banners and other
forms of interactive and distributable web content. Users create "sprouts"
by dragging and dropping rich media such as video, audio, images, text,
shapes, and interactive services such as Twitter, Ribbit, PollDaddy and
more. Sprouts can be embedded onto any Web site, blog, or social networking
profile, and updates to the sprout are instantly reflected in all copies in
circulation. Sprout's customers range from individuals, organizations, and
business small and large, including major record labels such as Universal
Music Canada.
"While Flash content is ubiquitous on the Web, the process of creating
and distributing Flash content was time consuming and required specialized
skills. And integrating Flash with third party Web services and components
has been near impossible. With Sprout, anyone can quickly create rich,
Flash-based content that incorporates advanced components and Web services,
and distribute them on the Web," said Carnet Williams, co-founder and CEO,
Sprout. A video interview with Sprout's co-founder and CEO, Carnet Williams
is available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dL33PSV-ioc.
"We've been on the widget bandwagon for some time now, and are thrilled
to have found a team in the space to back," noted Mike Hirshland, in a blog
post 'Why Polaris is Backing Sprout.' "The web's basic building block is
shifting from websites to embeddable, portable chunks of content --
widgets, gadgets, whatever you want to call them. Sprout has quickly
established itself as the early leader for creating, launching and managing
this fast-emerging content format, much like our portfolio company Allaire
did with website creation a decade ago, and we think Sprout has a similar
opportunity to build tremendous value."
About Sprout
Sprout is the premier platform for easily creating, publishing and
managing sophisticated rich media content on the Web. With Sprout, anyone
can quickly and easily build widgets, minisites, banners and other rich
media content for their blog, social networking profile or web site. Sprout
is based in San Francisco, CA, and Honolulu, HI. To learn more, please
visit http://www.sproutbuilder.com.
About Polaris Venture Partners
A national venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management,
Polaris invests in seed, early stage and growth equity businesses in the
technology, life science, digital media, enertech and consumer sectors.
Other digital media investments in Polaris' portfolio include
Automattic/Wordpress, BlackArrow, Heavy, JibJab Media, Quantcast and
Turbine Entertainment.
Through a philosophy of lead investing and active, long-term partnering
with entrepreneurs and management teams, Polaris has helped many companies
achieve outstanding success. Among them are: Accordant Health Services,
Acusphere, Advanced Inhalation Research (AIR), Akamai Technologies, Allaire
Corporation, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, American Superconductor, Archivas,
Aspect Medical Systems, Avici Systems, Centra Software, Classifieds2000,
Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Cushcraft Corporation, deCODE genetics,
Exchange.com, GlycoFi, Matrics, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Paradigm Genetics,
Powersoft, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Solidworks, and TransForm
Pharmaceuticals.
Contact:
Laura Bartlett
KMC Partners
laura@kmcpartners.com
617-682-3779
SOURCE Sprout
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Related links:
http://www.sproutbuilder.com
CONTACT:
Laura Bartlett of KMC Partners,
+1-617-682-3779, laura@kmcpartners.com, for Sprout
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