Montreal Tech Watch

StatusNet gets $1.27m additional funding, $2.3m raised to date

By Heri Aug 7th 2010 in Business, Open Source

StatusNet has announced early this week $1.27 Series A funding from FirstMark Capital, BOLDStart Ventures, plus also existing investors iNovia Capital and MontrealStartup. This brings StatusNet’s total funding to $2.3 million

Status.net The 2 new venture groups, FirstMark Capital and BOLDStart Ventures are from New York City. Scott Switzer, from FirstMark, joins also StatusNet as new board member. He previously founded OpenX, an open source advertising platform, well-known amongst fellow bloggers and media companies. The US investors, as well as StatusNet’s growing team in San Fran, shows ever-increasing operations and also sales in the US, similar to CoRadiant’s path. StatusNet announced recently a successful implementation of their software at Motorola, presented as a typical customer who’d get substantial advantages from running internally StatusNet.

Congratulations to Evan Prodromou (@evan, @evanpro on twitter), StatusNet’s founder. Evan is a strong citizen and actor of the open source movement, but at the same time has a rare flair on creating successful businesses by leveraging open source dynamics, as demonstrated for instance by one his previously venture wikitravel. For those who didn’t follow StatusNet, here’s a quick recall:

What’s next? 2010 is a ripe year for social media, probably the year where many big companies are comfortable on getting company-wide social software to their employees. StatusNet can break in by selling its usability and popularity on identi.ca, as well as the fact that the source can be installed in a company’s server for more security. Its most obvious competitor Jive Software, which doesn’t have StatusNet’s usability, popularity nor does it have any open source code. BUT Jive Software sells installs of its “social enteprise 2.0″ software by millions though, and as a matter of fact, just got $30m funding from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. Jive is going for the home run and unless StatusNet hires an army of salesmen as well as bringing *major* enhancements to its product, it’s hard to see StatusNet’s edge… unless it is for single departments / groups in a company, or small businesses who can’t get Jive’s ticket entry price. We’ll wait and see I guess for news from StatusNet on how they plan to win the social enterprise market.

  • Intellitix provides rfid access to Coachella

    #coachella

  • twtspire.com| idea for the next startup = One Tweet Away? twtspire.com| idea for the next startup = One Tweet Away?

    twtspire.com| idea for the next startup = One Tweet Away?

    Startups solve problems. So if you find a problem there’s probably a startup idea lying somewhere nearby. A Montreal developer Kenji Williams developed an app called twtspire.com that scours twitter and automatically detects tweets from people that wonder why a solution doesn’t exist for a specific problem they’re having. Here are example of tweets from [...]

  • AccelerateMTL : more than just a conference

    AccelerateMTL is coming up on the afternoon on May 23rd, right after the FounderFuel demo day. It’s announced as a conference full of good keynotes, from successful entrepreneurs like BeyondTheRack founder, renowned Internet marketers, and other Internet execs. View more on the eventbrite page. As the name suggests, the presentations were curated to accelerate startups. [...]

Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.

blog comments powered by Disqus