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The creator movement is entering prime time, and so is Circle with a fresh $4M
The creator movement has exploded in the last few years as platforms ranging from Substack to Clubhouse have made it easier than ever to reach an audience of willing readers and listeners. Yet the key to building sustainable creator businesses is the economics of these enterprises themselves. Get enough subscribers, and what often starts as a side hobby can quickly become a full-time job.
Circle was founded in January 2020 to make engaging with paying customers and thus building creator businesses as effortless as possible. We profiled the NYC-based startup last year when it announced its $1.5 million seed round in August, discussing how its founder DNA originates in the online course platform Teachable. Since then, all signs point to very strong early growth.
The company surpassed $1 million ARR last month, and it already has 1,000 paying customers and is heading toward 2,000 paying communities. Usage is also growing rapidly, expanding 40-50% per month for both DAUs and MAUs, according to the company. It also brought its iOS app out of beta last month.
CEO and co-founder Sid Yadav said that “we happened to catch the tide at the right time [with] the creator movement, the community movement.” So far, paying communities have been largely centered around “a lot of YouTubers, course creators, Twitch streamers, Patreon personalities,” with Yadav estimating that 60% of the platform’s communities are “personality-led.” That said, “a lot of brands are starting to think of this creatively.”
All that positive news can’t be ignored by VCs too long. The company announced today that it has raised a $4 million seed round at a valuation “north of” $40 million, which closed late last year. The round was officially led by Notation Capital, which led the company’s pre-seed round last year, but the firm only took a quarter of a round according to Yadav.
Circle’s team has grown to 20 across multiple continents. Photo via Circle.
Instead, much of the round’s allocations were handed out to the entrepreneurs building on the platform. “We had all of these offers from top-tier firms, but for the kind of product that we are — which is a creator platform — it made sense to allocate the round as much as possible to our customers,” Yadav said. According to the company, a majority of the round went to individual angels and community builders on the platform, among them Anne-Laure Le Cunff, David Perell, Tiago Forte and Nat Eliason.
Given the company’s early stage, product development remains the highest priority. “Our approach is like a Notion,” Yadav said, describing how Circle allows its communities to stitch together “building blocks” to lay out pages. Circle’s primary mode is through a Space, where community members can discuss topics with each other and the creator as well. Communities built on Circle can be white-labeled, with their own custom domains.
Circle’s community platform allows creators to publish content and engage with their community. Photo via Circle.
Circle’s ultimate goal is to integrate under one roof every tool a creator needs to engage with a customer, from publishing newsletters and podcasts to setting up streaming, event ticket sales, merchandise and event calendars — all buttressed by a payments layer. Many of those features remain to be built on top of the company’s core community platform, but Yadav and his team are certainly ambitious in their expansive scope.
Circle’s team is now 20 people, with team members in Europe, India, Australia and across the United States.
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Tencent backs digital rights startup Pex in $57M round
Pex, a startup aiming to give rightsholders more control over how their content is used and reused online, has raised $57 million in new funding.
The round comes from existing investors including Susa Ventures and Illuminate Ventures, as well as Tencent, Tencent Music Entertainment, the CueBall Group, NexGen Ventures Partners, Amaranthine and others.
Founded in 2014, Pex had previously raised $7 million, and it acquired music rights startup Dubset last year. Founder and CEO Rasty Turek told me that while the product has evolved from what he described as “a Google-like search engine for rightsholders to find copyright infringement” into a broader platform, the vision of creating a better system of managing copyright and payments online has remained the same.
The startup describes its Attribution Engine as the “licensing infrastructure for the Internet,” bringing together the individuals and companies who own content rights, creators who might want to license and remix that content, the big digital platforms where content gets shared and the law enforcement agencies that want to monitor all of this.
The product includes six modules — an asset registry, a system for identifying those assets when they’re used in new content, a licensing system, a dispute resolution system, a payment system and data and reporting to see how your content is being used.
Turek said that while Pex is being used by “most of the largest rightsholders in the world,” the system was built to be accessible to “a struggling musician out on the streets of Los Angeles” who doesn’t have the resources to “police all of this content” online.
Pex CEO Rasty Turek. Image Credits: Pex
He also suggested that the broader regulatory environment is calling for a solution like Pex, with the European Union passing a new copyright directive that’s set to take effect this year, and new copyright legislation also on the table in the United States. The EU bill was criticized for potentially prompting larger platforms to preemptively block broad swaths of content, but Turek argued, “There’s so much content out there in search of an audience that this is going to be the opposite of overblocking.”
Not that Pex is relying entirely on regulators. Turek also said the platform is structured to balance the needs of the different groups using it — and that it has an incentive to strike that balance because its revenue comes from licensing deals, so it’s focused on “really being the Switzerland, really being the neutral party.”
“We designed all of our business around the idea that if we try to abuse the system, we lose, too,” he said. “We don’t make money [when someone] abuses the system, we only make money when everybody plays nice.”
Turek also claimed that public domain and Creative Commons licenses are “first-class citizens” on the platform, and that many of the rightsholders using the Attribution Engine don’t necessarily want monetary compensation: “A lot of people are happy to do this for recognition. We are social animals.” (Plus, recognition can lead to moneymaking opportunities.)
Pex says the new funding will allow it to continue scaling the Attribution Engine.
“I don’t believe investments are validation,” Turek added. “I believe they’re more obligation than validation, but they do prove you are directionally correct.”
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BuzzFeed uses AI to create romantic partners in its latest quiz
A new BuzzFeed quiz is the first in what Director of Product for Quizzes Chris Johanesen said he’s hoping will be a series of “stunt-y experiments” that the publisher launches this year.
The quiz, timed for Valentine’s Day weekend, promises to “create your perfect boyfriend (or girlfriend) using AI technology.” Johanesen said it’s designed to “poke fun at the situation we’re all in” (quarantine, obviously), as well as the “weird world of online dating.”
To take the quiz, you answer a series of multiple-choices questions about what you’re looking for in your ideal romantic partner.
The questions will probably feel familiar to anyone who’s taken a quiz on BuzzFeed or elsewhere online, but the answer should be a lot more unique: Johanesen noted that in a normal online quiz, there might be “12 or 20 different results that are written, and that’s pretty much it.” With this one, “you could retake it dozens of times and never get the same results.”
Johanesen explained that the BuzzFeed team generated an enormous variety of different profile images using StyleGAN technology. For the text, BuzzFeed staff contributed personality traits, text messages quotes, hobbies and “weird, dark stuff” that the quiz combines algorithmically.
“I think we’re mostly trying to embrace the absurdity of it,” he added. (I saw this myself when I tried out a demo earlier this week and was assigned a girlfriend who wanted to show off her “collection of scabs.”) “We try to match it a little bit to some of your inputs so that it’s not totally random. … An early version was more realistic, but it wasn’t as fun.”
Looking ahead, Johanesen said he’s hoping to create more quizzes that are “more generative,” where a writer might come up with a concept but they don’t have to “handwrite every single option.” Still, it sounds like this approach requires significant editorial work, which Johanesen doesn’t expect to change.
“We could definitely use machine learning models to write a quiz, but it probably wouldn’t be very good,” he said. Instead, the team is interested in “that intersection of what technology can do that humans can’t, and what humans can do that technology can’t.”
More broadly, he noted that BuzzFeed is experimenting to find new ways to refresh the quiz format, for example with the Quiz Party feature and Quiz Streaks.
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TikTok partners with Whisk to pilot a recipe-saving feature on food videos
TikTok is expanding its integrations with third-party services, with the launch of a test that allows creators in the food space to link directly to recipes found on the Whisk app. This is being made possible by way of a new “recipe” button overlaid on related TikTok food videos. The feature makes a TikTok cooking video more actionable as it encourages viewers to not just watch the content, but also take the next step to save the content for later use.
The new button could also potentially drive significant traffic to Whisk — especially if a particular recipe went viral — like the “TikTok Pasta” videos have in recent days.
The addition is being made available in partnership with Whisk and is currently in “alpha testing,” TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch. TikTok says it has also worked with Whisk to help identify food content creators who could serve as the first adopters of the new functionality.
We found the feature in action on one of TikTok’s top food creators’ profiles, The Korean Vegan, aka Joanne L. Molinaro.
Image Credits: TikTok screenshot
The button was also first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra on the @feelgoodfoodie TikTok account.
The way the feature works, from the TikTok viewer’s side, is fairly simple.
A user who’s in the test group may come across a video on the app that includes the new button that reads: “See full recipe.” The button appears just above the creator name and video description on the bottom left of the screen — the same spot where the “Green Screen” button would otherwise appear. When tapped, you’re directed to a Whisk page where you can view recipe photos, see ingredients and choose to save the recipe to your own collection, if you’re a Whisk user.
This all takes place while still inside the TikTok app.
On the creator’s side, adding the recipe button to a video is done during the posting workflow via a new “add link” option.
The ability to add a “save recipe” feature to a TikTok video wouldn’t necessarily have to be limited to food content creators, however. Whisk allows anyone to create a recipe community on its platform, which means people can grow their followings simply by curating their favorite recipes around some sort of category or theme — like Instant Pot meals or favorite smoothie ideas or comfort baking, for example.
Image Credits: Whisk
Whisk has also been working more recently to expand its recipe communities to serve as a home for curators and creators alike by allowing them to point to their websites, if they have one, or link out to their social media profiles, including Instagram, YouTube and, of course, TikTok.
The idea is that fans would view the content on social media and be inspired, then visit Whisk as the next step in terms of saving the recipe, creating a shopping list or actually trying the recipe at home. This sort of “actionable” content could present a challenge to Pinterest, which has been expanding into short-form video through Story Pins. The feature allows Pinterest creators to share video content in the tappable “story” format — including recipe and cooking videos.
Pinterest hoped to use Story Pins as a way to differentiate its short-form videos from rivals, noting during its earnings last week that Story Pins are “not as focused on entertainment,” but rather “what the Pinner could do to enrich their own lives.”
TikTok’s selection of Whisk as a new partner makes sense as the recipe app has gained a rapid following since its late 2019 launch. Today, Whisk sees over 1.5 million interactions per month on its platform. It also just won a “Best of 2020″ Google Play award.
Whisk’s TikTok button, however, is not the first integration of its kind.
Last month, learning platform Quizlet announced a similar TikTok feature aimed at creators in the education space. In its case, the buttons overlaid on top of videos would link directly to Quizlet’s study sets, like its digital flashcards. At the time, it wasn’t clear that the new Quizlet feature was a part of a larger effort to connect TikTok videos more directly with related apps and services — an addition that could lead to an expansion in TikTok content and, perhaps, influencer sponsorships, further down the road.
There’s potential for TikTok to form other partnerships like this as well, given the app’s ability to drive trends across a number of content categories, effectively becoming the video alternative to Pinterest’s image bookmarking site.
At year-end, for example, TikTok published lists of 2020’s “top trends” in cooking, music, beauty and style. On the style front, TikTok already ran a livestreamed video shopping pilot with Walmart that used influencers to drive purchases, demonstrating the potential in connecting video inspiration to consumer action in an even more timely fashion.
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Reduct.Video raises $4M to simplify video editing
The team at Reduct.Video is hoping to dramatically increase the amount of videos created by businesses.
The startup’s technology is already used by customers including Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman and IDEO. And today, Reduct is announcing that it has raised a $4 million round led by Greylock and South Park Commons, with participation from Figma CEO Dylan Field, Hopin Chief Business Officer Armando Mann and former Twitter exec Elad Gil.
Reduct was founded by CEO Prabhas Pokharel and CTO Robert Ochshorn (both pictured above). Pokharel argued that despite the proliferation of streaming video platforms and social media apps on the consumer side, video remains “underutilized” in a business context, because it simply takes so much time to sort through video footage, much less edit it down into something watchable.
As Pokharel demonstrated for me, Reduct uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing and other technologies to simplify the process by automatically transcribing video footage (users can also pay for professional transcription), then tying that transcript to the video.
“The magic starts there: Once the transcription has been made, every single word is connected to the [corresponding] moment in the video,” he said.
Image Credits: Reduct.Video
That means editing a video is as simple as editing text. (I’ve taken advantage of a similar linkage between text and media in Otter, but Otter is focused on audio and I’ve treated it more as a transcription tool.) It also means you can search through hours of footage for every time a topic is mentioned, then organize, tag and share it.
Pokharel said that AI allows Reduct to simplify parts of the sorting and editing process, like understanding how different search terms might be related. But he doesn’t think the process will ever become fully automated — instead, he compared the product to an “Iron Man suit,” which makes a human editor more powerful.
He also suggested that this approach changes businesses’ perspective on video, and not just by making editing faster and easier.
“Users on Reduct emphasize authenticity over polish, where it’s much more the content of the video that matters,” Pokharel said. He added that Reduct has been “learning from our customers” about what they can do with the product — user research teams can now easily organize and share hundreds of hours of user footage, while marketers can turn customer testimonials and webinars into short, shareable videos.
“Video has been so supply constrained, it’s crazy,” he continued. “There are all these use cases for asynchronous video that [companies] haven’t even bothered with.”
For example, he recalled one customer who said that she used to insist that team members attend a meeting even if there was only two minutes of it that they needed to hear. With Reduct, she can “give them that time back” and just share the parts they need.
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Zynga CEO says he’s on the lookout for more acquisitions
If you’re wondering why Zynga issued $875 million in convertible notes at the end of 2020, CEO Frank Gibeau said the company was fundraising to build up a “war chest” for more acquisitions.
“As you know, we’ve been a consolidator inside of this business for a while, and we’re going to continue to be on offense [looking for] great companies, great cultures, great teams that we can bring into Zynga,” Gibeau told me.
In the last year alone, Zynga acquired two game studios based in Istanbul — Peak Games for $1.8 billion and Rollic for $180 million (in the latter case, it only acquired 80% of the company initially).
“There are now four or five examples of us having done this successfully,” Gibeau said. “When we started, nobody was picking up our phone calls. Now when we call, we are a bit of a destination of choice for a lot of developers out there.”
Gibeau and I were speaking about Zynga’s fourth quarter earnings, in which the company reported all-time high revenue of $616 million and a net loss of $53 million (though another measure of profitability, adjusted EBITDA, was actually positive at $90 million). Daily active users were up 77% year over year, to 36 million, while monthly active users were up 103%, to 134 million.
Looking ahead, Zynga is forecasting revenue of $2.6 billion (a 32% year-over-year increase) and adjusted EBITDA of $450 million for 2021. And while another acquisition could significantly grow the business, Gibeau noted that the company’s forecasts have “no acquisitions assumed,” adding, “We’re in a great position, because we would prefer to do acquisitions in 2021, but we don’t have to do any deals.”
There are new games lined up for 2021, including Puzzle Combat, Farmville 3 and a Star Wars title. The company also plans to continue developing hypercasual games, to develop more cross-platform games, to expand internationally and to continue building out its ad network — in fact, he suggested that Apple’s upcoming privacy changes could be good for Zynga.
“A lot of traditional marketing services are not going to be able to survive very well,” he said. “Because we’re a first-party data company — all the data we generate is coming to our services from our games — and because we’re at scale … IDFA is an opportunity for our company.”
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Podz turns podcasts into a personalized audio newsfeed
Podz is the latest startup trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery, with backing from investors like M13, Katie Couric and Paris Hilton.
“Even though podcasts have gained a lot of momentum — there are 100 million folks in the U.S. who listen to podcasts — we still haven’t seen that crossover behavior, where audio becomes a part of everyday lives,” CEO Doug Imbruce argued. “We think that’s because the experience of discovering and consuming podcasts is ancient. It literally feels like browsing the web in 1997.”
Imbruce’s name may be familiar to longtime TechCrunch readers, as he was previously the chief executive at Qwiki, which won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 (Cloudflare was one of the runners up), then acquired by Yahoo a few years later.
By Imbruce’s own admission, Qwiki never quite lived up to his hopes for remaking online media consumption, but he said that its vision of “machine-created media” offered “a taste of the future” — a future that he’s hoping to help usher in with Podz.
The problem the startup aims to solve is pretty straightforward. Because podcasts often consist of 30 or 60 minutes or more of spoken-word audio, they’re difficult to browse, and when you discover new ones, it’s usually through word-of-mouth recommendations or clunky search tools.
While tools like Headliner make it easier for podcasters to promote their content with short clips on social media, Podz automates that creation process and makes those clips the centerpiece of the listening experience.
Image Credits: Podz
In the Podz mobile app, users browse what the startup calls “the first audio newsfeed,” consisting of 60-second podcast clips. These clips are designed to highlight the best moment from each podcast, making it easier to sample a much wider array of titles than the ones to which you currently subscribe. Each clip should stand on its own, but if you want to dive deeper, you can save the full episode for listening later.
These clips are created automatically, and Imbruce said “the beating heart of the Podz platform” is a machine learning model that “identifies the most engaging parts of podcasts.” The model was trained on more than 100,000 hours of audio, in consultation with journalists and audio editors.
For example, here are the clips chosen from the three most recent episodes of the Original Content podcast — our reviews of “Soul,” “The White Tiger” and “Bridgerton.” Each clip seems reasonably self-contained, and although I was a little dismayed to discover that they all focused on me (rather than my more eloquent co-hosts), a Podz spokesperson explained that’s because the app focuses on “the highest density speakers.”
The Podz newsfeed is personalized to your interests (and, if you choose, it also can draw on the podcasts you follow in Apple Podcasts and the accounts you follow on Twitter). Imbruce said it should become smarter over time as it observes listener behavior.
He added that the team is hoping to introduce more creative and monetization tools for podcasters over time: “We are really hopeful that we can both increase amount of audio being created by 10x and increase the monetization of audio by 100x.”
In addition to Imbruce, the Podz founding team includes CTO Seye Ojumu, Head of Design Rasmus Zwickson and iOS lead Greg Page. The startup has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from M13, Canaan Partners, Charge Ventures and Humbition, as well as notable angel investors like Couric, Hilton (who’s launching her own podcast) and Mara Schiavocampo (The Trend Reporter).
“We are living in a golden age of audio, but only 1% of podcasts reach an audience of 5,000+,” M13 General Partner Latif Peracha told me via email. “Podz plans to grow the audience for existing audio but the real focus will be on growing new audio by leveraging their creator tools. Already, the average podcast listener subscribes to seven podcasts but follows almost 30 on Podz. Early signals make us optimistic the team can build a transformative product in the category.”
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Daily Crunch: Reddit raises $250M
Reddit raises more funding, Shopify expands payments to Facebook and a study suggests that the Apple Watch might be able to predict COVID diagnoses. This is your Daily Crunch for February 9, 2021.
The big story: Reddit raises $250M
This latest funding announcement comes after Reddit has returned to the headlines, with the WallStreetBets subreddit playing a crucial role in the spectacular rise and fall of GameStop shares (along with other stocks). The company also ran a five-second Super Bowl ad on Sunday, consisting of a single static image.
Reddit announced the round in a blog post that said the money comes from “existing and new investors” and will allow the company to “make strategic investments in Reddit including video, advertising, consumer products and expanding into international markets.”
The tech giants
Shopify expands its payment option, Shop Pay, to its merchants on Facebook and Instagram — This is the first time Shop Pay will be made available outside of Shopify’s own platform.
CD Projekt hit by ransomware attack, refuses to pay ransom — “We have already secured our IT infrastructure and begun restoring data,” the game company said.
Spotify confirms it’s (finally) testing a live lyrics feature in the US — Though the streaming music service today offers live lyrics in a number of markets, it has not done so in the U.S. for many years.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Swarm’s low-cost satellite data network is now available to commercial clients — One of the original startups that set out to create a low-Earth orbit satellite constellation to provide a data network here on Earth is now open for business.
Mighty Buildings nabs $40M Series B to 3D print your next house — The startup says it can 3D print a 350-square-foot studio apartment in just 24 hours.
Seed firm Eniac Ventures raises $125M for its fifth fund — The size of Eniac’s funds has grown dramatically over the past decade, from its $1.6 million first fund in 2010 to its $100 million fourth fund in 2017.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Decrypted: A hacker attempted to poison Florida town’s water supply — Oldsmar is a small town in Florida that became the center of the cyber world this week.
Are SAFEs obscuring today’s seed volume? — SAFEs are a quick and cheap method for raising capital.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Announcing the agenda for TC Sessions: Justice — Our second-ever dedicated event to diversity, equity, inclusion and labor in tech is coming up on March 3.
Mount Sinai study finds Apple Watch can predict COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before testing — The investigation, dubbed the “Warrior Watch Study,” used a dedicated Apple Watch and iPhone app and included participants from Mount Sinai staff.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
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Spotify confirms it’s (finally) testing a live lyrics feature in the US
Spotify this morning confirmed it’s testing a new, synced lyrics feature in the U.S. market, following a report from Engadget. Though the streaming music service today offers live lyrics in a number of markets — 27, in fact, including its recent launch in South Korea — it has not offered lyrics in the U.S. for many years. Instead, Spotify here runs the “Behind the Lyrics” feature provided in partnership with Genius, which offers a combination of lyrics and trivia about the song being played.
Reached for comment, Spotify said the new lyrics feature rolled out as a test for some users in the U.S. starting today.
“We can confirm we’re currently testing our lyrics feature to a select number of users in the U.S.,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning.”
The company declined to share additional details about its plans, but did note that its U.S. partner on the new lyrics feature is Musixmatch — a service that already powers Spotify’s lyrics feature in various non-U.S. markets.
This is not the first time Spotify has run a lyrics feature in the U.S., to be clear. The streaming service had originally worked with Musixmatch from 2011 through 2016, before ending that relationship to instead partner with Genius. But despite ongoing user demand for lyrics’ return, Spotify never brought the feature back to the U.S.
In more recent years, however, Spotify rekindled its relationship with Musixmatch. Last year, it announced the launch of real-time lyrics in, then, 26 worldwide markets across Southeast Asia, India and Latin America. This had been the first time lyrics were offered in 22 of these 26 markets, as only Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico had some form of prior lyrics support via other providers.
Spotify’s ongoing lack of support for lyrics in the U.S. has given its streaming music competitors an advantage. Amazon Music, for example, allowed users to view lyrics as songs played and tied the feature to its Alexa voice platform, so consumers could ask Alexa to search for songs by lyrics. Meanwhile, the updated version of Apple Music that rolled out with iOS 12 in 2018 included a way to search by lyrics, instead of just artist, album or song title. It later added live, synced lyrics with the launch of iOS 13. Siri can also respond to commands that involve lyrics.
Musixmatch additionally confirmed it has partnered with Spotify on the new U.S. test.
“Musixmatch is growing at a fast pace thanks to [the] continued investment we’ve made [over] a decade. We’re focused now on bringing more data to continue enriching the audio experience globally,” Musixmatch CEO and founder Max Ciociola told TechCrunch.
Because the lyrics feature is only a test, you may not see it yourself in the Spotify app, due to its limited availability. Spotify has not said if or when the test may be expanded.
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Automattic acquires analytics company Parse.ly
Automattic, the for-profit company tied to open-source web publishing platform WordPress, is announcing that it has acquired analytics provider Parse.ly.
Specifically, Parse.ly is now part of WPVIP, the organization within Automattic that offers enterprise hosting and support to publishers, including TechCrunch. (We use Parse.ly, too.)
WPVIP CEO Nick Gernert described this as the organization’s first large enterprise software acquisition, reflecting a strategy that has expanded beyond news and media organizations — businesses like Salesforce (whose venture arm invested $300 million in Automattic back in 2019), the NBA, Condé Nast, Facebook and Microsoft now use WPVIP for their content and marketing needs.
Both companies, Gernert said, come from similar backgrounds, with “roots” in digital publishing and a “heavy focus on understanding the impact of content.”
“We’ve really started to shift more towards content marketing and starting to think more deeply beyond just what traditional page analytics provide,” he continued. That means doing more than measuring pageviews and time on site and “really starting to look more deeply at things like conversation, attribution, areas … that from a marketer’s perspective are impactful.”
WordPress and Parse.ly already work well together, but the plan is to make WPVIP features available to Parse.ly customers while also making more Parse.ly data available to WPVIP publishers. And Gernert said there are also opportunities to add more commerce-related data to Parse.ly, since Automattic also owns WooCommerce.
The goal, he said, is to “make Parse.ly better for WordPress and best for WPVIP.”
At the same time, he added, “There’s no plans here to make Parse.ly the only analytics solution that runs on our platform. We want to preserve the flexibility and interoperability [of WordPress], and we want to make sure from a Parse.ly perspective that it still exists as a standalone product. That’s key to its future and we will continue to invest in it.”
Parse.ly was founded in 2009 and has raised $12.9 million in funding from investors including Grotech Ventures and Blumberg Capital, according to Crunchbase. Parse.ly founders Sachin Kamdar and Andrew Montalenti are joining WPVIP, with Kamdar leading go-to-market strategy for Parse.ly and Montalenti leading product.
“We’ve always had deep admiration for WPVIP’s market position as the gold standard for enterprise content teams, and we’re thrilled to be able to join together,” Kamdar said in a statement. “From the culture and people, to the product, market and vision, we’re in lockstep to create more value for our customers. This powerful combination of content and intelligence will push the industry forward at an accelerated pace.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
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