Gravity to improve its personalization platform engine with new Series B funding

It was two years ago that three MySpace executives left the company to create their own startup–a social network called Gravity. Not much else has been heard about them since that time, until now. Today, Gravity has announced it has raised $10.6 million in Series B financing in a round led by GRP Partners and participation from their existing investors, Redpoint Ventures and August Capital.

Gravity is a comapny that promotes itself as a service that offers a unique and personalized experience, helping its users discover the best content based on their unique interest. While initially a consumer-focused service, it quickly pivoted and is now focused on advertisers and publishers. Nevertheless, their goal remains the same: personalize the Internet.

For those interested in the service, Gravity will enable your website or application to “deliver real-time personalized experiences for each user”. Through their Interest Graph technology, users will connect with the content that they care about the most, thereby allowing them to have a better experience while increasing engagement. Seems like a win-win for everyone. And they’re already doing it — right now they’re serving more than 25 million recommendations each day to more than 200 million users on a wide range of applications, from the CNN Money iPad app to the homepage of TechCrunch.

Amit Kapur, CEO and co-founder, said in a release: “We’ve always believed that digital experiences shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all. The next major shift beyond the social web will be the personal web. Gravity’s platform helps drive that evolution by helping every website and application tune itself for you and deliver content you’ll love.”

Personalization of content has been a hot item for a while now with Facebook still trying to capitalize on it. Flipboard and Zite have been doing a great job of that on the go and and recently, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer told her employees that personalization was going to play a big part to turn the company around.

With the new funds, Gravity hopes to be able to expand its operations, allow for the increase in publisher partners, and enable the deployment of a large scale content marketing platform.

Mark Suster, partner at GRP Partners, said, “Amit and the founders of Gravity built Myspace from its earliest days until it achieved enormous scale and chose to leave at the company’s peak to build something they passionately believed would create a better experience for hundreds of millions of Internet users. I believe they’ve build it, and, given the value Gravity can unlock in any website or application, it represents a huge market opportunity. I’m excited to see what comes next.”

In total, the company has raised around $20.6 million and has a team of 25 employees working to help add more relevancy to the Internet.

Photo Credit: Mud Bug Media