In a doubling-down by existing investors, Pocket, the content-shifting company formerly known as Read It Later, has raised a $5 million series B round led by Foundation Capital, while Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures also participated. This follows a previous funding round of $2.5m, which all three VC firms participated in (along with Founder Collective, and several angel investors) — so effectively this is a follow on round.
The company plans to use the new funds to bring its “save for later” experience to more devices and platforms, expand its team, and improve its services for developers and content partners.
Pocket, which often draws comparisons to Instapaper, lets users ‘save’ content on the web to read or watch on any device, anytime — otherwise referred to as space-shifting and time-shifting, two concepts almost as old as media itself. The company was actually started before Instapaper in 2007 by founder Nate Weiner who bootstrapped and developed the product almost singlehandedly until early 2011.
Meanwhile, in April 2012, the company relaunched as Pocket, reflecting its support for media beyond just text, and targeting of mobile devices. Along with browser-based versions, Pocket has apps for iOS and Android, and is integrated via its API into more than 350 third-party apps and services including Flipboard, Twitter and Zite. As noted earlier, expect more platforms to be supported — perhaps Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 support could be on the horizon, given Microsoft’s recently unveiled smartphone and tablet plans.
Growth-wise, Pocket claims its nearing 1 million ‘saves’ per-day, making it the number one in its space. These include things as diverse as magazine articles, YouTube videos, recipes and “things to buy”.
Pocket is a service that lets you save what you find on the web to watch and read on any device, anytime. Founded in August 2007 by Nate Weiner, it is now based in San Francisco.
Foundation Capital is an investment firm run primarily by entrepreneurs. Each partner left a successful career in industry to work in venture capital in order to work with other entrepreneurs to build great new companies. They have backed successful entrepreneurs across various sectors — from enterprise software to clean technology to consumer Internet and fabless semiconductors. Typically, Foundation makes an initial investment of $1 to $10 million and follow that by participating in each subsequent round of financing. As...
Baseline Ventures is a seed-stage capital firm founded by Steve Anderson in late 2006. Bringing his diverse experience from eBay, Microsoft, Kleiner Perkins, Starbucks and Digital Equipment Corporation, Steve founded Baseline to in order to help entrepreneurs build and grow their ideas into companies. Since its inception, Baseline is proud to have backed over 60 founding teams in promising software and web companies including Rupture (acquired by EA), Mixer Labs (acquired by Twitter), Heroku (acquired by Salesforce), Versley (acquired...
Google Ventures is the financially motivated venture capital arm of Google Inc., founded in 2009. Google Ventures invests in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others. They aim to invest about $100 million a year, with deal sizes ranging from seed to late-stage investments of tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital. Google Ventures currently invests in the U.S. and has offices in...
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