Twitter Scores Investment from USV and CRV

by Brian Solis on July 27, 2007

by Brian Solis 

Twitter is the new Kleenex. The new Fed Ex. The new Xerox.  Why?

Because it is now a brand associated with an action.

Can you pass me a Kleenex please. I need to clean the glass so I can make a Xerox of this stuff that I then need to Fed Ex tonight. Oh, I’ll do this by Twittering my status along the way.

Twitter is leading the way for microblogging aka life streams, flow applications, and nanoblogging.  Now Twitter can twitter that it also scored a round of funding which ultimately will help them get more people on the Twitter bandwagon, twittering their updates for all the other twitteroos to enjoy all over the world.

New York City-based Union Square Ventures (we’ve dubbed them the hitmakers of Web 2.0), led the round of funding for founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey to drive Twitter to the next level in redefining how we communicate. USV are also investors in del.icio.us, Feedburner, Tacoda (this is the ad firm that AOL recently purchased).

The amount was undisclosed at the time of this writing.

I was personally wondering when Twitter was going shift from project to business, and take the leap for raising serious cash.  After all, the space is heating up with a leading set of contenders paving the way for new communications applications, both horizontal and vertical, including Jaiku and Pownce.  All carry the daunting task of crossing over to the masses, but at this early stage, each solution is building a core and dedicated user base that will grow independently of each other, with some, but minor, overlap.

The thing that makes Twitter so fascinating is that it has opened its API to the development community to create cool, interesting, and clever mashups that extend the functionality of Twitter for specific applications. There is an abundance of lists, wikis, and directories to find the latest and greatest as well as the most popular. 

In my opinion, the development around Twitter is only second to the flurry of third-party applications launching on the Facebook platform.  I’m sure we’re also going to see a flood of activity around those building Safari-based applications optimized for Apple’s iPhone, but that’s another story.

Fred Wilson, managing partner at USV, stated in his blog post about the deal: 

Twittering is an emerging new form of communication on the Internet that changes the expectations associated with other forms of communication and yet it’s fundamentally different than blogging. Twitter provides a platform for banter that blogging doesn’t and it’s available in so many places via IM, mobile text messaging, or the Web that it induces a different sort of behavior. Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs.

Jack Dorsey also posted on the Twitter blog about the deal:

From some of his early writing about Twitter we had a hunch Fred Wilson was someone we’d get along with. After we met with Fred and his team, we knew we wanted to work together…To help us achieve these goals we’re also working with our old friends out here on the West Coast at Charles River Ventures. In addition, we’re honored to include some folks we’ve been inspired by as angel investors including Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant, to name a few.

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