Shareaholic raises $3M Series A funding led by Kepha Partners

Boston and New Delhi-based Shareaholic, Inc., which runs the content sharing site Shareaholic, has raised $3 million in its series A funding led by Kepha Partners. All existing investors including General Catalyst Partners, NextView Ventures, 500Startups, Boston Seed Capital, and angels also participated in the round.

The company had earlier raised $2 million from General Catalyst Partners, NextView Ventures, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Nicole Stata of Boston Seed, Edward Roberts of MIT, Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot and others. Prior to this, the company has raised $355,000 as angel funding in 2009, when it crossed the 100-million user mark. The new investment takes Shareaholic's total funding to $5.35 million.

"The time was right to fuel up (raise funds) to further accelerate and support our product roadmap. In the past 6 months, we have built a team of 10 across engineering, product and marketing functions. We have also expanded beyond content sharing and now power content discovery and consumption," wrote Jay Meattle, founder and CEO, Shareaholic, in an official company blog post.

The company was founded by Meattle, a US-based entrepreneur of Indian origin, in 2008 and it claims to reach to over 300 million users across the globe through web browser extensions, open platform APIs, and networks of content publishers. Nearly two million people have downloaded Shareaholic's browser plug-in, which enables content sharing via Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr and traditional e-mail. More than 2 lakh websites use Shareaholic tools, according to the company.

In an interview with Techcircle.in in April this year, Meattle had mentioned that the company was not looking for further funding at the time. He said though India is still a nascent market, it accounted for 10 per cent of Shareaholic's overall user base, but ruled out any customisation for the Indian market.

The company had in May launched Shareaholic Analytics, which offers insights like the most popular content, who's sharing it, and through which channels to publishers. Shareaholic competes with ShareThis and AddThis, among others. In May, 2011, AddThis, a social sharing and targeting platform, had raised $20 million in a Series D round of funding from Institutional Venture Partners, NEA and Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)