NewsGator closes new $12M financing

As you might have already read this morning (depending on whether my post makes it out first!), NewsGator has closed a $12M financing round, bringing our total capital raised to $30M.

As the founder, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what we’ve accomplished, since that fateful day when I signed the series A paperwork. At that time, there were 2 full-time employees including me, NewsGator Inbox was called “NewsGator for Outlook” (wait, is NewsGator a company or a product?), and NewsGator Online was a subscription-only service (I like to think of it back then as the best kept secret in the industry).

And now? Yowsa. For starters, we’ve grown to about 75 amazing people, who have all really helped shape the company into what it is today (thanks guys!).

Our consumer product suite has grown, from not only NewsGator Inbox and NewsGator Online, but also with FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Go! for both Windows Mobile and Backberries, and quite a few other point products. And they all communicate with each other via the sync system we’ve put in place via NewsGator Online’s back-end platform (which processes around 7 million new articles per day).

We developed NewsGator Enterprise Server, our enterprise-class server system for aggregating and distributing content within the enterprise. It also implements our sync system, so all of our popular desktop and mobile clients also work in the enterprise. The server also integrates very tightly with Microsoft SharePoint, via our NewsGator Social Sites product. RSS is really the underlying plumbing for enterprise 2.0 – and NGES leads the market in providing this infrastructure. And this technology is real – over 100 of the Fortune 2000 have implemented NGES, and they’re thinking of new ways to use it every day.

And on top of that, using our core online platform, we’ve built up a part of our business called Syndication Services, providing content-related services to third parties such as media companies. We’re one of the leading widget platforms on the web, providing widgets to media companies and others that live on just about any site (including, of course, OpenSocial sites), delivering hundreds of millions of widget views every month. And our commercial web service APIs service tens of millions of API requests every day.

Whew! That sounds like a lot, from humble beginnings. :-) But the bottom line is, we want our consumer applications to be as ubiquitous as possible, while we continue to sell our software and services to businesses…and this new round of capital helps us expand our market and solidify our leadership.

So what’s next? Well, that’s a topic for another post…but rest assured, we’re working on some pretty amazing stuff (if I do say so myself!), and we’ve got a lot of news coming up soon. Stay tuned!