Livefyre is a real-time content marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to discover, manage and publish user-generated content to their own properties, including websites and mobile apps. Founded in 2009 and led by CEO Jordan Kretchmer, the company powers real-time content experiences for over 1,500 brands, including AOL, Mashable, Sony PlayStation, Unilever and Universal Music Group. Its platform combines real-time content, conversation and social curation to increase traffic, engagement and revenue for clients. The company expanded via acquisitions of Storify (September 2013) and Realtidbits (November 2013). Livefyre plans to use the new capital to invest in research and development, expand sales and marketing, and grow in international markets. The recent financing totaled $47M across a Series C2 and a Series D. Livefyre is a social commenting and live engagement platform offering real-time comment streams, social logins, and rich-media embedding. It also provides a live-blogging tool and a brand-focused product called StreamHub that enables live chat and custom applications. StreamHub includes a Curate feature to add filtered live social content to sites and supports rule-based streams (e.g., photos or geo-restricted tweets). The company reports its network reaches more than 120 million people, delivers over 1 billion live content streams monthly, and has 10 million registered users commenting. Customers include Bravo TV, Showtime, Fox Entertainment, The New York Times, CBS, The Daily Beast, Fox News, AOL and NBC Universal. Livefyre plans to use new funding to accelerate product development, expand mobile capabilities (mobile SDKs and native apps), staff a Labs group for experimental products, and build advanced moderation and quality-control systems; it hit its revenue and bookings goal last year and expects to double that this year. Livefyre provides a socially enhanced platform that enables publishers to replace static comment sections with dynamic, real-time conversations and to build a variety of real-time applications. The company has released a second-generation conversation platform that introduces SocialSync™, a set of social features that pull in relevant comments from Twitter and Facebook in real time. Livefyre positions its product to increase reader engagement by integrating social streams directly into content pages. The company intends to use recent funding to scale engineering and sales efforts and to accelerate development of its innovation roadmap. Livefyre was founded in 2009 by CEO Jordan Kretchmer and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Livefyre is a San Francisco startup preparing to launch an embeddable comment system that aggregates conversations across the web. Its product combines game mechanics, user reputation, and semantic technology to alert users to related conversations on other blogs. The company says its XMPP architecture enables true real-time conversations and faster performance versus platforms that merely refresh periodically. Livefyre plans a freemium model with a free version for individual bloggers and paid versions for larger publishers. It has signed up 200 bloggers and publishers and plans to start embedding on sites on July 24. Financially, Livefyre raised $800,000 in a first round of funding led by Hillsven Capital with participation from Zelkova Ventures, ff Asset Management and angel investors Travis Kalanick and Paige Craig.

Total raised

$67M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series D

Latest activity

Feb 2015