Apture Secures $4.1M Funding Round

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, March 17. 2009 at 09:40 AM EDT Post a comment

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Apture Inc., which helps publishers to create immersive multimedia experiences directly on their Websites, has locked down a $4.1 million Series A financing round from Clearstone Venture Partners .

Apture's goal is to help Web publishers keep readers on their sites, by enabling them to insert multimedia that pops up within the Web page, thereby reducing the number of users that depart when seeking more information elsewhere.

"A lot of publishers don't realize that 20 to 25 percent of their traffic gets lost to people leaving the page to search for information," says Apture CEO Tristan Harris.

By embedding a single piece of code onto their sites, publishers can easily add audio, video, pictures, and other entertainment or informational content from a range of API-driven sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, and Wikipedia.

So far, Apture has been fairly successful in signing up large publishers to use its code on their sites. Sample customers include The Washington Post, the BBC, and The New York Times.

For now, Apture licenses its technology to large publishers on a monthly basis. The company is also exploring the possibility of revenue-share deals through increased ad inventory and impressions that it enables. Apture has a free version of its platform available for small publishers and blogs, as well.

With the funding, Apture seeks to scale up its engineering and business development teams. The company currently has about seven full-time employees, and it also uses contractors. However, the company's not looking to grow payroll too quickly -- Harris says Apture will remain pretty lean and keep the burn rate low over the next six months, or until the macroeconomic picture starts to clear up a little.