Kara Swisher reports on a soon-to-be-transacted funding for Twitter based on an $8B valuation, raising $800M, with $400M to be used to cash out employees and earlier investors.
Kara Swisher
This is more than double what Twitter was valued at when it got $200 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins in December at a $3.7 billion valuation.
Once the latest investments are complete, Twitter’s total cash haul since it was founded five years ago will be $760 million.
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The latest funding is an important one for Twitter and will up the pressure for its management, including CEO Dick Costolo, to really get its business growing in terms of revenue and profits.
Twitter is still struggling with coming up with a truly lucrative business model, and its execs have presented a number of them, such as promoted tweets, largely based on advertising.
I wonder if Costolo has looked into the enterprise side of things, and I don’t mean social media. I mean work media: helping businesses coordinate, communicate, cooperate, and collaborate internally, and with partners and customers?
It’s a large and growing market, with competitors like Jive, IBM, Yammer, and Podio, but Twitter has huge advantages, and could move aggressively.
