RockMelt, the social web browser, has secured $30m in Series B funding from some of the biggest names in venture capital, and added Jim Breyer at Accel Partners and Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures to its board of directors as observers.
Both were brought on by early investor Marc Andreessen, partner at Andreessen Horowitz and founder of Netscape, the first widely used web browser.
“Back when we created a browser in the 90’s, if we had known how important social media would be, we would have built the browser very differently back then,” Mr Andreessen said. “This is a chance to essentially fix that and do it right.”
RockMelt has built social functions like Facebook chat, friending and messaging into its browser, and included a friend list along the edge that stays visible no matter what pages users navigate to on the web.
Company founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes said they will use the money to double their staff over the next year from 40 to 80 employees, hiring engineers, designers, data analysts, and marketing experts.
“We really want to accelerate product development,” Mr Vishria said.
The founders also want to form partnerships with other companies so they can build gaming, music, and commerce into the browser. They envision their browser will be personalized for different users based on web surfing habits, so, for example, people who do a lot of online shopping might see an icon for Amazon, eBay, or Groupon in their version of the RockMelt browser.
The RockMelt founders plan to tap into the knowledge and experience of their most recent investors, asking Mr Breyer to help find the talent they need in an increasingly competitive hiring market and Mr Khosla to keep them thinking about the long term vision of the company.
Existing investors Bill Campbell of Intuit, Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, angel investor Ron Conway, and Mr Andreessen also participated in the funding round.
