OneSpot is On The Move

Austin-based OneSpot is announcing today that they’ve closed a $4.2M round of Series A funding. The money was invested by Dallas-based Silver Creek Ventures, and general partner John Adler will join the board. Also joining the board of directors is Brett Hurt, co-founder and CEO of Austin-based Bazaarvoice.

OneSpot is a tool that allows publishers to automatically discover and publish fresh, relevant content to their online properties. Give OneSpot a list of high quality exemplar blogs, and OneSpot will search through thousands of blogs and score them based upon a patent-pending link scoring algorithm. The highest quality stories get published on your website. The company came out of stealth mode in June with some impressive early clients, including the Wall Street Journal, which has expanded their use of the technology. You can check out their technology news page, where the “Technology Stories from Around The Web” section is powered by OneSpot.

“OneSpot has a proven solution that has already delivered substantial value to some of the world’s largest and most influential media sites,” said John Adler, General Partner at Silver Creek. “We are thrilled to add OneSpot to our portfolio. We believe this is a disruptive technology that has the potential to create economic value for millions of smaller publishers and businesses.”

OneSpot has been incubated at Tech Ranch Austin long before the official branding was announced. “I actually met our CTO Mason Hale through Kevin Koym of Tech Ranch Austin many years ago,” said OneSpot CEO Matt Cohen. “One of the reasons that Tech Ranch has needed to expand is because we’ve expanded so much.”

Matt tells us that he will use the funding to make the OneSpot service more broadly available in the market. That includes growth in sales and marketing, as well as continued product improvements. The company has always been very capital efficient, and that will not change. Using this round of financing to achieve profitability is certainly a goal, according to Cohen, as long as it’s balanced with the rapid growth that the compay is poised for.

Posted by Bryan Menell http://austinstartup.com Bryan is the founder and Editorial Director of AustinStartup.com, which launched in 2005. He is currently the Director of the Collaboratory at venture-funded Dachis Group. Bryan advises a handful of early stage companies and is a Managing Director of Capital Factory. To read more posts click here.