Libboo began around 2007 as a crowdsourced, team-publishing site founded by Chris Howard and Richard Hawthorn and later became a 2011 MassChallenge finalist and a TechStars Boston graduate. Earlier this year the company shifted its focus from collaborative publishing to discovery, aiming to create a Pandora-like discovery mechanism for books. Libboo matches “buzzers” (vocal readers and sharers) with authors based on taste profiles and rewards those readers with free eBooks and increased influence within the community. The platform is designed to drive social sharing, blogs and email promotion to help unknown authors reach new audiences and potentially create digital bestsellers. Libboo recently announced a three-month pilot partnership with Houghton Mifflin to give users early access to debut and emerging authors and to create promotional buzz. The company is still refining its discovery and measurement tools and has not finalized monetization, though it may charge authors or publishers if it can demonstrate measurable increases in attention. Financially, Libboo raised a $1.1M seed financing that signaled investor interest in its new discovery direction.

Total raised

$1M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Oct 2012