KickApps Draws in Dollars
Red Herring, August 14, 2007
By Leah Messinger
KickApps, whose technology helps website operators incorporate social networking features into their sites, is one of a growing number of white-label developers hoping to cash in on the social network craze.
New York City-based KickApps has often been compared with Palo Alto, California-based Ning, but KickApps is trying to set itself apart from the crowd by catering to enterprise customers.
The company also provides branded widgets – tiny applications that play video and audio and display photos – designed with the look and feel of a publisher’s website.
Santo Politi, founder and general partner at Spark Capital, a key backer of KickApps, said the company decided to focus on enterprise opportunities rather than individual consumers in hopes of building a bigger business.
“We thought that individuals building a personal social network might be great, but it might not be that scaleable, whereas with enterprise you can build a much more leverageable, defensible, scalable business in that market,” he said.
To that end KickApps, which was founded in 2005, has provided tools to more than 5,000 sites. The company offers its developer platform and hosting for free, but makes money by placing and drawing revenue from a certain number of ads that run next to their widgets on a publisher’s site. Publishers such as Autobytel that make the bulk of their profit from advertising can also choose to buy KickApps out of its advertising shares.
The KickApps platform is currently only available in English, though it will soon be offered in several Western-based languages, according to KickApps CEO Alex Blum. Later this year the company will release a version of its tools in several Asian languages.
KickApps’ Series A round of $7 million was led by Spark Capital and also included Prism VentureWorks and Jarl Mohn.
[via Red Herring]
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