Social Media Aggregator RebelMouse Raises $10.25M

RebelMouse, the startup that allows users to combine updates from across social networks into what it calls a “social front page,” is announcing that it has raised $10.25 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Oak Investment Partners and SoftBank Capital, with participation from Sterling Investment Partners and Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow. Oak and SoftBank had previously invested in RebelMouse’s $2.5 million seed round — founder and CEO Paul Berry (formerly CTO of the Huffington Post) told me that he intentionally raised his initial funding from investors who “would have no problem doing the next round.”

The Series A, Berry added, “signals a little bit of a move from us being incredibly scrappy to beginning to focus on being scalable.”

The idea behind RebelMouse is to make it easy for both companies and individuals to create a constantly updated presence on the web, distilling their social media activity into a single page. The page is updated automatically, but it can be edited and customized by the user.

I met with Berry a little more than a month ago, right around the one-year anniversary of the site’s launch, to discuss its growth and future plans. At the time, he said it was reaching 5 million unique monthly visitors, and he was planning to start running native advertising on the site. I’m not sure I need to include all the links from my previous story again showing brand and publisher interest, but hey, why not point to SyFy’s page for its social media sensation “Sharknado”. (It wasn’t a huge ratings hit initially, yet it seems to be doing better with each airing).

Now Berry says RebelMouse is up to 7 million uniques, up 900 percent since January, and it’s working with a growing group of advertising partners.

In addition to the funding, RebelMouse is also announcing several recent hires. Jarrod Dicker, who previously led social and content ad products at Time Inc, has joined as managing director of commercial product and operations. Andrea Harrison, formerly digital brand director at Pepsi, will lead platform marketing. And Jake Beckman, who worked on content at Bloomberg TV, is RebelMouse’s new partner accelerator.

Berry said there are now 36 people on the RebelMouse team — which despite having an office and small core team in New York City, is pretty geographically distributed.

As part of the Series A, Oak’s Fred Harmon is officially joining Berry, SoftBank’s Jordan Levy, and Eric Hippeau on the RebelMouse board — though Berry noted that Harmon had been attending the meetings already.