CoTweet, Major Brand Twitter-Platform Gets VC Funding (WFMI, SBUX, MSFT, JBLU, F, PEP, S, KO)

No one knows how to value social media’s dominant players.  The real value for Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace is elusive (and less than before).  Twitter is one of these businesses which suddenly has all the buzz, yet find someone who can tell you what the ultimate monetary value of Twitter is.  Many older internet users are hardly familiar with the term ‘blogging’… let alone microblogging.  But today a company operating as a Twitter platform operator and brand manager has received venture backing.

CoTweet is a web-based collaboration platform that helps companies reach and engage customers in real-time using Twitter for brand management. The product is already said to be used by Whole Foods Market Inc. (NASDAQ: WFMI), Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), JetBlue Airways Corporation (NASDAQ: JBLU), Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP), Sprint (NYSE: S), and The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO)

CoTweet raised $1.1 million in venture funding from a group venture and angel investors.  The funds and groups that invested were Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.  Some of the companies have invested in social media and other companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Digg and Yammer.

The company allows multiple users to communicate through corporate Twitter accounts and stay in sync with a single dashboard, support multiple editors for each account, track conversations, assign tasks, create follow-up tasks and schedule posts. It also supports the automatic addition of “cotags,” that designate who is replying on a company’s behalf.  In short, it is wiki-ing the micro-blogging platform.

We have not yet heard what valuation model the funding went in as.  CoTweet was founded in 2008, and is based in San Francisco, CA.

JON C. OGG
July 9, 2009