RebelMouse, the startup that allows users (whether they’re companies or individuals) to combine updates from across social networks into what it calls a “social front page,” is announcing that it has raised $10.25 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Oak Investment Partners and SoftBank Capital, with participation from Sterling Investment Partners and Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow. Oak and SoftBank had both previously invested in RebelMouse — founder and CEO Eric Berry (formerly CTO of the Huffington Post) told me that he intentionally raised his initial funding from investors who “would have no problem doing the next round.”
The Series A, Berry added, “signals a little bit of a move from us being incredibly scrappy to beginning to focus on being scalable.”
I met with Berry a little more than a month ago to discuss the site’s growth and future plans. At the time, he said it was reaching 5 million unique monthly visitors, and he was planning to start running native advertising on the site. Now he says RebelMouse is up to 7 million uniques, up 900 percent since January, and it’s working with a growing group of advertising partners.
In addition to the funding, Berry is also announcing several recent hires. Jarrod Dicker, who previously led social and content ad products at Time Inc, has joined as managing director of commercial product and operations. Andrea Harrison, formerly digital brand director at Pepsi, will lead platform marketing. And Jake Beckman, who worked on content at Bloomberg TV, is RebelMouse’s new partner accelerator.
There are now 36 people on the RebelMouse team (which is largely geographically distributed, with an office in New York City), Berry said.
As part of the Series A, Oak’s Fred Harmon is officially joining Berry, SoftBank’s Jordan Levy, and Eric Hippeau on the RebelMouse board — though Berry noted that Harmon had been attending the meetings already.
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