Techno-fille

eSnips Closes $2M in Series A Funding with Greylock Partners and Gemini

We’re happy to announce that we closed a $2M Series A fundraising with Greylock Partners and Gemini, both excellent, top-tier VCs. This is great for eSnips, we’re all thrilled.  With the funding itself comes an amazing and extremely experienced team responsible for some of the most successful investments in the Internet space and in tech industry in general.  They are very impressive people with a very unique approach to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. 

So what got them to decide to invest?  Well, there is nothing more convincing than strong traction and fast growth, and eSnips has been getting a lot of it since we made the beta available.  Almost one million users joined eSnips and contributed great content that is attracting in turn millions of visitors per month to the site.  There’s content about almost any topic you can think of, and it’s all user contributed….it’s all about our users, their content and the communities they form on eSnips. 

Marshall Kirkpatric wrote about it today on Techcrunch.  I was pleased to see that Marshall remembered and emphasized eSnip's unique mix of ecommerce functionality within social sites and user generated content.   Marshall wtore about the ecommence addition when we launched it back in July.

Here are some quotes for the announcement: 

“eSnips provides a simplicity and comprehensiveness that can capture a mainstream Internet audience well beyond teens,” said Erez Ofer, partner at Greylock Partners.  “As social sharing site use expands, the winning players will be those who provide a central location with broad appeal and strong e-commerce capabilities.  eSnips is well-positioned to deliver upon on the promise of this sector,” Ofer said.

“The demand for the kind of service and community that eSnips is providing is evident by its significantly high user base of its product,” said Daniel Cohen, partner at Gemini Israel Funds. “eSnips appeals to a more mainstream audience, which is a growing need as social sharing sites start to become as ubiquitous as email. We are excited to continue our investment in eSnips vision and be a part of accelerating the growth of their business globally.”

“With nearly one million registered users worldwide, we are thrilled to be working with both Greylock and Gemini to further advance eSnips development and marketing efforts,” said Yael Elish, CEO of eSnips. “The additional funds will enable us to expand faster than we could otherwise, accelerate our product development and offer new offerings to customers in our existing communities, as well as attract new ones to the eSnips network.”

Elish adds, “People have lots of stuff to share and today they’re expected to use five to 10 different services to do it.  With eSnips, people only need to go to one place for all their sharing needs. They can share any type of file or content and create as many separate sharing environments as they want. We want eSnips to be the one place where mainstream users go to for all their online sharing needs. Our goal is to make sharing your interests and passions easy, and to appeal to every user, not just the technical wizards or youth.”

   

Inspiration from the eSnips Karaoke Community!

Those who read my blog know that I mention very frequently the eSnips karaoke community. It started with general interst which later became fascination (I now listen to eSnippers singing karaoke almost every day), and it eventually got to me too, I started singing too.... 

A couple of weeks ago, when driving from LA to San Diego on the way to the DEMO Conference Hagit spotted a karaoke store (Ace Karaoke), we went in and bought a small  ‘All in one’ karaoke solution which we dragged all the way home.

So yesterday was the first karaoke night at our home…big success, it started at 9:30pm ended at 2:00am, it was great fun.  Each of us anxiously waited our turn to sing. Needless to say that the only ones who enjoyed are the ones that sang. I, for example, shamelessly ruined a beautiful song called ‘My Immortal’ for everybody, and the neighbor next door, who’s a singer told me this morning that they had a huge laugh hearing one our friends singing ‘I did it my way’.   In contrast Here's how 'My Immortal' sounds when sung by a pro karaoker on eSnips. 

Bottom line: karaoke rocks. If you’ve never tried you should.  I recommended to start from the privacy of your home… , then upload it to eSnips of course. That’s my next task! 

New: On-site video and audio creation on eSnips

A couple of weeks ago we added the ability to create video and audio right from within eSnips. Cool feature that makes it really simple for anyone to create and share video and audio online. People love it. It’s fun.

My 8 and 5 year old daughters, accompanied with 2 friends swarmed into our office last week and sat in front of the computer Here’s the result:   Not very civilized I’m afraid, but sweet.

Amazing composer on eSnips

Must listen to this piece.  This is simply beautiful. It is original Chamber Music Composition by David Alabaster , UK.  He writes that it's a live recording of tricky Cello duet played by his neighbour and his desk partner in the NYO a few years ago.  The entire folder of compositions is here, and more from David Alabaster is here.