Betaworks, Accelerator Group Buy Majority Stake In Twitterfeed
This story was written by Joseph Tartakoff.
Twitterfeedwhich has become the de-facto way for publishers to distribute their RSS feeds over Twitterhas found two prominent investors to fund its rapid growth. New York City incubator Betaworks, along with London-based The Accelerator Group, have purchased a majority stake in the company, according to Accelerator Group partner Saul Klein. Both firms have invested together in the past in a number of high profile real-time web startups, including bit.ly and Tweetdeck. The news was first reported by Silicon Alley Insider.
The size of the investment was not disclosed. However, Klein told us it would allow Twitterfeed to offer additional services that publishers have wanted but "to date (founder Mario Menti) has not had the bandwidth or financial capacity to provide." The site will get a revamp in the next several weeks, Klein said. Menti initially started the service while working for the BBC as an independent contractor and then "put it out there as a free service." He had been running TwitterFeed during week-ends and evenings but will now dedicate himself to it full-time. "You can imagine given the growth rate, supporting now 170,000 publishers, 300,000 feeds ... that becomes something a person can't do in their spare time," Klein said.
By Joseph Tartakoff