Connect Raises $10 Million to Fix Social Media Sprawl
Its easy to make contacts in the age of social networking and smartphones. Its much more difficult to manage them.
Connect is the latest company to try to tackle the problem. The startup announced Wednesday that it has raised a fresh $10 million from investors including the venture arm of Chinese conglomerate Fosun International and Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The infusion brings the companys war chest to $13 million.
Launched in February, Connects app merges contact information from Facebook , LinkedIn, Gmail, Instagram, and iPhone address books, allowing users to message their contacts from all those platforms inside the app. Available for iPhones, for the Web and early next year for Android devices, Connect has 750,000 monthly active users according to Chief Executive Ryan Allis.
Were integrating all of your social networks into one place, said Allis. People want one tool.
Connect isnt the first to try. Brewster, a startup based in New York has been chugging along with its app to solve the same problem since 2012. Its founder Steve Greenwood declined to say how many users the company had, but emphasized the technical difficulty of sewing together so many different social networks.
Users who would like to integrate Outlook contacts with the others are out of luck: Neither service integrates the Microsoft e-mail program.
Connects secret sauce, besides the catchy domain Connect.com (which cost the company $1.65 million, Allis said), is the way it takes advantage of real-world location information. For instance, when a contact from out of town checks in on Facebook in a users city, the Connect app sends the user a notification.
Allis, 30, already has one notch in his entrepreneurial belt. In 2012, he sold a company he founded, email marketing firm iContact, to software firm Vocus for $169 million.
The Connect app is free. Eventually, though, it could make money by charging for downloads, showing ads, or charging for services like payments, Allis said.
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Connect Raises $10 Million to Fix Social Media Sprawl