An Infusion of Another $100 Million Is Seen for Twitter

News Type: Event — Seeded on Sat Sep 26, 2009 2:53 AM EDT

Article Source: The New York Times

Twitter, which has no discernible revenue, is set to raise about $100 million of new funding that would value the company at around $1 billion, a person briefed on the company's plans said Thursday.

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For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino's Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year. Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with running advertisements on its Web site, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans to begin widely running ads until 2010.

But Twitter's cash infusion and exospheric valuation are not easily reduced to the level of the blind bets of past dot-com bubbles. In its three and a half years, Twitter has become a magnet for media attention, and its Web site now attracts 54 million visitors a month, according to comScore, the tracking firm. Along with Facebook, it is helping to remake the Web as a forum for the perpetual sharing of even the most trivial bits of information about people's lives.

"There have probably been less than five examples of companies that have grown like Twitter has," said John Borthwick, the chief executive of Betaworks, which created the link-shortening service Bit.ly. (Betaworks also invested in Summize, a Twitter search engine that Twitter acquired last year, and it now owns a small stake in the company.)

Mr. Borthwick lists Google and Facebook as other examples. Twitter "represents a next layer of innovation on the Internet," he said. "This investment is happening because it represents a shift."

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#1 - Sat Sep 26, 2009 2:53 AM EDT

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An Infusion of Another $100 Million Is Seen for Twitter

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