The Next Web

Crowdfusion: publishing platform raises $3 million from Andreesen and others

Written on August 1, 2008 – 12:01 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

Crowd Fusion is a revolution in online publishing, offering web publishers an unique combination of technology and strategy. Or at least, that’s what I understood from their temporary website, the company is still in stealth mode. But attracted some interesting investors and raised an initial investment last night. Crowdfusion is going to supply in:

• Collaborative development tools & best-of-breed publishing templates
• Automatic, on-demand application scaling.
• Innovative content management, database management & performance evaluation/optimization tools
• Extensive online database & information repository handling.

While the exact functionalities remain vague to the public, it is clear that Brian Alvey will be running the company, he is the founder of a blogging company that launched blogs like Engadget, Autobog and Joystiq. The platform raised $3 million last night from some interesting investors:

• Velocity Interactive Group, investors in Doppelganger, Ad Infusion.
• Greycroft Partners, investor in Doppelganger, Fuze and paidcontent.org
• Serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic, Ning and board member at Facebook.

It seems that the platform facilitates publishing facilities for the larger publishers out there. We decided to send them an e-mail for some more clarification. We got an automated reply telling:

“Crowd Fusion’s mission is to revolutionize online publishing with a unique combination of technology and strategy.

We are not currently taking on any platform customers. Right now we’re creating our own sites and testing out our model. If you are an advertiser interested in partnering with us on our new brands, please contact me by replying to this email.

Best regards, Steve Friedman,”

It all sounds interesting, I have to admit that I just got interested in the platform because of the investment of Andreessen. My initial thought was: “Maybe this is not just another publishing platform, but actually something worthwhile.” Turns out that the platform is specifically in the high volume niche, and I especially like the group of people involved. Well, wel’ll see. If it’s worthwhile, we’ll keep you updated in the future.

I hope you like that post!

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blogging platform, Brian Alvey, crowdfusion, Greycroft, Marc Andreesen, Publishing platform, scaling, Steve Friedman, Velocity