Stipple, the advertising startup that helps Web publishers monetize their images, just announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding.
The company already raised a $2 million seed round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Maples’ Floodgate, Justin Timberlake, and others. Floodgate and Relevance Capital led the new round, and there’s a long list of other investors:
Stipple allows publishers to label and share people, places, and things in their images. Those images can in turn be used for monetization through commerce or advertising — for example, if you label a piece of clothing in a picture, Stipple can allow the reader to buy that clothing. Companies like Luminate and ThingLink are trying to do something similar, but CEO Rey Flemings says that with millions of tagged images, Stipple has the the largest “corpus” on the Web, and it’s adding 1 million new images per month. He also says there 4,000 active publishers in the Stipple network, adding up to more than 3 billion monthly pageviews.
Flemings says the money will be used for the usual things — growing the team and improving product, with a focus on mobile commerce. The next version of Stipple is scheduled to open to the public in mid-June.
Stipple revolutionizes image monetization & social shopping. More people see your images on the open web than on your site, ads, blog & apps combined. This is true for large and small businesses. Many sites allow tagging, but only Stipple connects tags to all copies of an image, then puts you in control of the content in & data from your images. Only Stipple offers image analytics, advertising & messaging inside images web-wide and without widgets or embed code....
FLOODGATE is a venture capital firm specializing in micro-cap investments in start-ups. The firm seeks to invest in technology related sectors. It typically invests between $150,000 and $1 million. The firm prefers to invest in companies located in either the San Francisco Bay Area or in Austin, Texas. It prefers to invest alongside other experienced private investors or top-tier venture firms. FLOODGATE is based in Palo Alto, California.
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
