Bit.ly Funding Round Announced

I am happy to see that the new round of funding for Bit.ly has been announced by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Bit.ly has been incubated by Betaworks, and the round of around $2M was led by Alpha Tech Ventures (the O’Reilly venture fund), with participation by Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, The Accelerator Group, Jeff Clavier, and Howard Lindzon’s new Social Leverage fund.

Bit.ly provides much more than URL shortening. In particular, the company is focused on extracting all sorts of information about how the shortened URLs (or ‘bitlys’) are used, when they are clicked on, and so on. With the growing use of shortened URLs in social tools, this could become a treasure trove of analytics. See my earlier post, Micropsychographics: Twitter Types And Retweeting, on some of these themes.

[Full disclosure: Bit.ly is an advisory client, I am a shareholder, and I am actively involved in the product design and direction.]