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

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 7:35PM EDT · Published Jul 9, 2:44PM EDT

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Money Stack Image 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

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.