After JotSpot sold to Google for $50+ million, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize venture capitalists would be dabbling a bit more in this space. So I am not at all surprised to report that Wetpaint, the Seattle based wiki company that we’ve raved about in the past, is announcing a $9.5 million Series B round of financing today, with investments from Accel Partners as well as previous investors Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures. Their Series A round, in October 2005, was $5.25 million.
Wetpaint’s key competitor, Wikia, has had more traction with users according to Alexa and Compete statistics, and claims 2.5 million page views per day. Wetpaint doesn’t disclose page views, but CEO Ben Elowitz told me they are “doubling quicker than every 2 months.” Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 150,000 unique wikis and over 2.5 million pieces of content contributed by users since launching last June.
Wetpaint has the smell of a company that’s built solid software and is seeing good user uptake. If they can keep expenses under control they will be a likely takeover candidate in the near future. Everyone except Google is taking a hard look at the wiki space right now.
For a good overview of wikis by feature, see WikiMatrix.
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