Betaworks, the six-year-old, New York City-based holding company that has collectively created and invested in more than a dozen startups focused on the “real time Web,” has raised $20 million in new funding, says cofounder John Borthwick, who tweeted in the wee hours of Friday morning: “Excited to bring a few new investors into betaworks. Approx. 20m total capital. The first time in 3 yrs+ that we have have done a raise.”
A new SEC filing shows a partial list of the firms to participate in Betaworks’s newest round, including Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures and White Star Capital in the U.K., all of which are existing investors.
Also listed on the Form D are John Drzik, president and CEO of the management consulting company Oliver Wyman; Michael Buckley, a longtime managing director at Intel Capital who is now the head of finance and strategy at Nike Digital; and Paul Cappuccio, the chief legal officer at Time Warner.
Excited to bring a few new investors into betaworks. Approx. 20m total capital. The first time in 3 yrs+ that we have have done a raise
— John Borthwick (@Borthwick) November 22, 2013
RRE Ventures, Lerer Ventures and White Star Capital were among the first firms to provide Betaworks with its first, $7.5 million round, announced in early 2008.
Two years later, in 2010, Betaworks closed on a $20 million Series B round that was led by RRE Ventures and then-new investor Intel Capital, and which included DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY, and Founder Collective.
Betaworks both invests in, acquires, and helps create real-time media startups. One of its first big wins was with Summize, a search engine that Twitter acquired in a mostly stock deal in 2008. Betaworks is also the company behind the link-tracking analytics company bit.ly, the Web site monitoring service Chartbeat, and numerous other products.
Recently, the company has made a big push into social reading, including acquiring Digg, which it nabbed at a fire-sale price last year, and purchasing the bookmarking tool Instapaper for an undisclosed amount in April. Betaworks has since relaunched both products.
Reached for comment on Saturday, Borthwick (nicely) declined to comment further, saying only that money was raised “recently.”
Earlier this month, Betaworks hired former Huffington Post Media Group publisher Janet Balis as its very first chief revenue officer, a sign that it’s looking for more ways to earn money off its portfolio. As Borthwick told AllThingsD of Balis’s appointment: “Phase one of Betaworks was building great companies. ” Phase two is “really building Betaworks as an operating media company.”
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