Affiliate marketing platform Skimlinks secures $1.5M Series A funding

skimlinks[UK] Affiliate marketing platform Skimlinks has secured a Series A round of funding, which we’ve now confirmed as $1.5 million.

The round, which was effectively a follow on, was led by Sussex Place Ventures and includes the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and The Accelerator Group, along with a number of the original angel investors involved in Skimlinks’ seed round earlier in the year.

The new funding will be used by the company to expand its US operations, where it currently generates over half of its revenue, along with investing in sales and marketing initiatives, and product development.

Skimlinks, which launched in December 2008, provides an affiliate links tool to enable online publishers to monetise their content by automating the process of creating and maintaining those links. Publishers are required to include a snippet of code on the footer of their site and then when a user clicks on any of the retailer links, Skimlinks automatically converts them into affiliate links. The service is free but Skimlinks retains a percentage of the commission paid out by the affiliate networks.

The Skimlinks platform currently supports 7,000 merchants across 22 affiliate networks internationally, while publishers using the system include Hachette Filipacchi Media US, Mirror.co.uk, AVForums.com and Future Publishing UK. The company also says that it’s seen month-­on-­month growth of 35% in the past year, and that November alone saw £6 million in merchant sales go through its platform. That’s pretty healthy considering we’re in a recession.

The company is co-founded by CEO Alicia Navarro, who adapted the model from Australia’s Skimbit.com which she also founded, and Biz Dev Director Joe Stepniewski also previously with Skimbit.