Apture Secures $4.1 Million in Series A Funding led by Clearstone Venture Partners

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SAN MATEO, Calif., March 17 Apture, (www.apture.com) a company with a mission to enable publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat web pages into connected multimedia experiences, announced today its Series A financing of $4.1 million led by Clearstone Venture Partners.

“We are thrilled to be working together with Clearstone to realize our vision of allowing publishers and bloggers to bring nearly all media types together on their sites in a way that lets readers see, hear, and truly immerse themselves in the ideas on the page,” said Tristan Harris, Apture’s CEO and Co-Founder. “We were extremely impressed with Clearstone’s experience incubating early-stage companies such as Overture and The Rubicon Project that are also designed to make online publishing more efficient and profitable.”

“Clearstone takes great pride in identifying outstanding entrepreneurs who are at the earliest stages of company development and are solving massive market inefficiencies or creating new markets,” said David Stern of Clearstone Venture Partners. “We immediately saw the potential for the Apture technology platform to turn online publishers into web guides, and fundamentally change the way content is produced, consumed, and monetized on the web. The early validation Apture received from premium publishers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters and the BBC in our diligence was very encouraging, and seeing how easy it is for bloggers to add Apture to their sites and immediately begin incorporating the ever-expanding universe of content APIs into their sites is promising.”

Prominent Silicon Valley Angel investors Beau Vrolyk (former Managing Director at Warburg Pincus), Paul Maritz (CEO of VMWare), and Steve Taylor (former Executive Vice President of the Boston Globe) also participated in the Series A financing and are advisors to the company. As part of this financing David Stern and Sumant Mandal, both of Clearstone Venture Partners will join Apture’s Board of Directors.

About Apture

Apture was created out of conversations with the Stanford Knight Fellows, a group of distinguished journalists from all over the world, about how to improve online news. Those conversations led the Apture team to develop a rich communication platform that allows people for the first time ever to fully immerse themselves in the ideas they are reading about without ever leaving the page. Today Apture serves bloggers and publishers across multiple verticals that want to easily integrate new dimension of rich media into their articles and quickly syndicate their content across the web. Learn more at www.apture.com.

About Clearstone Venture Partners

Clearstone Venture Partners excels at leading early-stage investments and company development across numerous sectors including: business and consumer internet within digital media, publishing and internet advertising, mobile and communication offerings as well as enterprise and carrier technologies. Clearstone prides itself on its many successful incubated projects and uses their expertise in supporting founding teams all the way from initiation to exit. Past successes, among many, include: Overture (sold to Yahoo), Paypal, MP3.com, and Netzero/ United Online. Clearstone has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Mumbai, India. www.clearstone.com

Source: Apture