2020systems Blog

Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone

Twitter today confirmed reports of a fresh $100m investment in the company, by announcing that it has closed what it called a “significant round” of funding.

A Wall Street Journal report earlier this Thursday pegged the new round of funding for Twitter at $100 million, and said backers were valuing it at $1 billion.

In a post on the company’s blog, co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams said that the three-year-old internet startup had received a new injection of money from four investors - though he did not confirm the size of the deal.

“It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value,” he said. “I’m proud of the team we’ve built so far and I’m confident in the future we’ll build together.”

It heralds the latest march forward for the highly-regarded startup, which now has more than 30m users worldwide using its service to send each other short messages through the web and their mobile phones.

The site’s growth has been boosted by celebrity users including Britney Spears and Ellen DeGeneres, as it attempts to find a business model that it hopes will propel it to profitability.

The company has now raised $155m over the course of four investment rounds, and has said that it plans to start rolling out money-making services in the coming months - including commercial accounts for businesses and brands - as well as saying it wanted to “leave the door open” on advertising opportunities.

It recently brought in a new chief operating officer, hiring former Google executive Dick Costolo earlier this month, as it attempts to expand even further and make its service more widely available. Costolo had been with the internet giant for two years, since selling his own startup, FeedBurner, to Google in 2007 for a reported $100m.

Facebook Inc. said Tuesday it achieved an important financial milestone, bringing in more money than it spent in the last quarter.  The social networking site previously had said it didn’t expect to achieve that goal until next year — even though the company already has been valued in the billions.

In a blog post on Facebook’s Web site, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company became “cash-flow positive” during the second quarter, which ended in June.

“This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term,” he wrote.

This does not mean that Facebook necessarily is profitable by the measurements that most companies use, though. Cash remaining after expenses could be swallowed by other costs like taxes, debt payments or accounting charges.

Zuckerberg did not indicate whether Facebook is now moving closer to filing for an initial public offering.

Facebook has raised more than $600 million from investors since it was founded five years ago. Its most recent infusion came this spring from Russian Internet investor Digital Sky Technologies, which invested $200 million in exchange for a 2 percent stake in the company, valuing Facebook at $10 billion.

Zuckerberg also said that Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook now has 300 million users worldwide.