February 14th, 2008
Seesmic raises $6 million in funding
Video startup Seesmic has raised $6 million in series A funding as its video conversation experiment continues.
Seesmic, now in closed beta, is led by Loic Le Meur and has backing by some big names–including Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, Steve Case of AOL fame, Michael Parekh, managing director at Goldman Sachs and Red Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. Those names are nice, but Atomico, an investment group founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis–those peer to peer experts behind Skype–led the investment with $5.5 million of funding. Le Meur goes into more detail on his blog and statement.
Seesmic is in closed beta and I’ve been playing with it as an observer for a few weeks. The gist of Seesmic is to make online conversation–IM, Twitter, email etc.–more video friendly.
Here’s a screen shot of what Seesmic looks like:
And another:
The general idea is to enable personal broadcasting and loop in a community of Seesmic users. Where is this Seesmic experiment headed? I have no idea, but it’s an experiment worth watching.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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