For all its talk of publicly sharing information with an ever-larger audience, Twitter kept curiously quiet when conversation turned to its own finances this time round.
It was first reported last week that Twitter was about to close a new round of funding. We confirmed as much yesterday, after new details of the funding emerged.
Insight Venture Partners, a New York private equity firm, and T. Rowe Price, a fund manager, are leading the $100m round, which values Twitter at $1bn. This is Twitter’s fifth round of funding, and brings total investment in the company to $155m.
But despite all the chatter, Twitter didn’t tweet about it.
Now co-founder Evan Williams has confirmed the funding in a blog post. (Twitter’s own account tweeted a link to the post.) While he named the new investors, which also include Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital, Mr Williams didn’t confirm how much the round was for or his company’s new valuation.
It was only in February that Twitter raised $35m, that time at a $250m valuation. That means that while Twitter has yet to make any revenues, investors feel its value has quadrupled in the past seven months as its audience and influence has grown.
Twitter is still a very small company, with fewer than 100 employees. The new funding will likely be used to add additional staff and scale the service. It should also be used to build a more robust back-end for the service, which has been plagued by outages and proven vulnerable to attacks.
Yet with $155m invested, a growing audience estimated at more than 30m, and a new set of investors, Twitter may soon find itself running out of time, and excuses, for spotty service and non-existent revenues.
