Seesmic has revealed details of its $6 million first round of funding, in which a group of prominent technology entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley angel investors put capital in the video "microblogging" startup.
According to a blog post by Seesmic founder Löic Le Meur, $5.5 million of the funding came from Atomico Investments, a firm operated by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Among the individual investors backing San Francisco-based Seesmic are SoftTechVC founder Jeff Clavier, LinkedIn Corp. founder Reid Hoffman, blogger Michael Arrington, angel investor Ron Conway and former AOL chief Steve Case.
Also participating in the investment were FON founder Martin Varsavsky, Goldman, Sachs & Co. managing director Michael Parekh, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship director Dan Gillmor, video blogger Steve Garfield, SupportSoft Inc. co-founder Mark Pincus, Topica Inc. founder Ariel Poler and Pulver.com founder Jeff Pulver.
Seesmic, now in private testing, allows users to publish short videos. The service is often compared to microblogging site Twitter, which allows users to post short blog entries via SMS messages from their mobile phones or the Web. Seesmic also plans to add mobile publishing functionality.
"It's human nature that people want casual, informal conversation," Le Meur told The Deal in December in discussing the startup's plans to launch a mobile service. "People in Seesmic are on video like they are in reality, and that's what is very new. You can't cheat, you don't have makeup or TV lights--you feel very much like you are. It's as if we were going to the pub or having coffee together. That's very different than TV, and totally different than YouTube because there's no conversation in YouTube."
Le Meur is the founder of French blogging startup Ublog, which was merged with San Francisco-based blog software developer Six Apart Ltd., and is the organizer of the annual Le Web conference in Paris.
In his post Le Meur said noted software programmer Dave Winer nearly participated in the round, but elected not to do so. Clavier invested a larger amount and took Winer's stake, Le Meur wrote.
Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype, a voice-over-Internet-protocol calling service, to eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif., in 2005 for $4.1 billion in 2005 and currently operate another video startup, Joost NV of Leiden, the Netherlands.
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