Blog Advertising Service Skyscraper Raises $500K Seed Round Led By Howard Lindzon And Tom Peterson Of Social Leverage

Skyscraper, the recently launched service that aims to make direct ad sales easier for bloggers, just announced that it has raised a $500,000 seed round led by Stocktwits founder and CEO Howard Lindzon and Tom Peterson of Social Leverage. The service launched out of Vancouver’s GrowLabs accelerator program earlier this year (it was still called Skyscrpr back then) and its focus is squarely on making direct ad sales as easy as possible for small to medium publishers.

Other investors in the service include Mike Edwards and Ray Walia from LX Ventures, Merrick, Paul Sethi (Redbooks Advertising), Sameer Jagetia (Redbooks Advertising), Max Teitelbaum (Whatrunswhere), Dave Johnson (Phonegap, Adobe), Dennis Pilarinos, David Lerner, Thijs Gitmans, Rob de Heus and Melissa Reiff.

Skyscraper gives its users a visual editor for adding advertising space to their blogs, but in addition, it also handles all the work around invoicing, scheduling, reporting and, of course, ad serving. The team isn’t saying much about what it plans to do with the additional funding besides that it’s focusing on the product and looking to hire.

The last time I talked to Skyscraper co-founder Paul Burger just before the product launched, he already told me that the team was looking into raising a first round, but at the time, he wasn’t able to go into the details. One interesting fact he noted about today’s announcement is that Skyscraper is the first company to raise its round using the new AngelList Docs service that allows startups to sign and close seed rounds with very low legal fees. Here is what Burger had to say about this process: “The AngelList docs experience was awesome – made it incredibly simple to create term sheets, add investors and ultimately collect signatures and funds. The support from the team was amazing, made it really easy to loop our lawyers into the deal and get it done fast!”