Shareaholic, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that makes browser extensions and other tools to facilitate the sharing and discovery of web content, tells TechCrunch that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Kepha Partners, and included participation from existing backers General Catalyst Partners, NextView Ventures, 500 Startups and other angel investors, who all invested in Shareaholic’s previous seed rounds. This brings the total outside capital invested in Shareaholic to $5.5 million.
Shareaholic started four years ago as a “nights and weekends” project, but has since blossomed into a full-on company with a current staff of 10 employees. The company, which began with a simple web extension to let people share content to their social networks, first garnered attention in 2008 when it won the Grand Prize in Mozilla Foundation’s Extend Firefox contest for the best Firefox add-on. Now Shareaholic has a whole suite of tools including open platform APIs for blog publishers and analytics tools for tracking audience behavior. The company says it now reaches 270 million users per month.
The new funding will be put toward hiring more staff to further build out its technology and products, Shareaholic says. The company has big ambitions for the future — last week it announced it had brought on former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata to its advisory board. At that time, Shareaholic’s CEO Jay Meattle told the Boston Business Journal’s Kyle Alspach that Stata would be used to help Shareaholic build “an open interest, influence, and intent graph at scale that rivals that of Facebook.”