September 25th, 2009
Twitter announces "significant" funding; offers few details
As expected, Twitter announced today that it had received “a significant round of funding with a group of investment firm” but offered few details beyond that.
Earlier this week, reports in the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch implied that the company was close to raising $100 million in funding at a valuation approaching $1 billion. Twitter didn’t offer those sort of details in a brief blog post this morning. In it, co-founder Evan Williams wrote:
It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value. Twitter’s journey has just begun and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I’m proud of the team we’ve built so far and I’m confident in the future we’ll build together.
The investment partners are: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital.
In his post earlier this week, Larry Dignan took note of T. Rowe Price as one of the investors, noting that the mutual fund firm isn’t exactly “a run-and-gun investment house.” Larry knows this firm to focus on the long-term investments, meaning that an investment in Twitter means that 1) Twitter is a long-term play, 2) T. Rowe Price wants to be among the first for an IPO allocation, or 3) T. Rowe Price is out of its mind.
Over time, we’ll know which scenario was right.
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Between the Lines via Email alerts or RSS.
