KICKAPPS GETTING REAL SOCIAL WITH VC FUNDS
Business
KickApps, a New York-based provider of software for building social networks, has raised $14 million in venture-capital funding, the latest sign that VCs...
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New York Post
KickApps, a New York-based provider of software for building social networks, has raised $14 million in venture-capital funding, the latest sign that VCs believe that its business model can keep kicking and ultimately, see a tidy profit, despite the current recession.

The financing brings the total Venture-capital funding raised by the two-year-old startup to $32 million, allowing it to add to its sales and marketing staff and to upgrade its platform at a time when most media companies – including social-network sites – are cutting back.

“So far, we seem to be recession proof,” said Alex Blum, CEO of the 70-employee firm, who noted that adoption rates for KickApps social-media services are accelerating because they help brands profit and gain advertising value from social media in a way that other services – such as FaceBook – have failed to do.

While a host of social-networking sites have raised money during the past year in the hopes of building a community from scratch for everything from business travelers to teens and game enthusiasts, KickApps takes a different tack: it provides software to companies to help create online-social networks and related services – including blogs, online video, message boards and widgets.

This has allowed the firm to win several big-name customers such as Rachel Ray, Gossip Girl, the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers and Warner Brothers, build upward of 50,000 social networks and attract 10 million viewers a month, according to statistics released by the company.

The firm also provides its corporate customers with an analytics tool – called a Social Graph Engine – that allows them to create detailed profiles of their social-network visitors, noting their likes and dislikes and then serve up targeted ads or even adjust or upgrade products to better suit their customer base.

The funding for KickApps comes at a time when social networks are growing. In August, Comscore, a digital-research firm, reported that on a global basis, traffic on social networking sites grew 25 percent over the past year, attracting over 580 million unique visitors.

Recent funding for KickApps was led by North Atlantic Capital, a venture-capital firm based in Portland, Maine. Repeat investors included Softbank, Spark Capital and Prism Ventures.