LiveFyre Raises More Funding To Take Conversations Beyond Just Facebook

Frank Gruber Oct 18, 2011 Tweet

LiveFyre, the San Francisco-based software platform that enables anyone to add a commenting system to a website, has secured an additional $4.5 million in a new round of funding led by Greycroft Partners and digital media investors Cue Ball, HillsVen Group, and ff Venture Capital.

Livefyre’s commenting platform is currently installed on more than 14,000 websites, including publishers like The Sun, Sugar Media, Talking Points Memo and MIT Tech Review. The Series B round will help LiveFyre continue to staff up and develop its platform, which will most notably compete with Facebook’s commenting system, a popular choice adopted by a number of publishers recently (with the obvious downside of being dependent on Facebook).

Timed well with the funding announcement, LiveFyre also launched its latest platform feature called SocialSync, which helps publishers share, follow and curate content in real-time as it spills out across the web.  The feature pulls comments and activity around your content into your comment stream – threaded, organized and easy to read.

LiveFyre founder Jordan Kretchmer had this to say about the funding:

We have an extraordinary roadmap of innovative features and are excited to partner with Greycroft to turn them into reality and further help publishers nurture and grow their communities.

We’ve been following LiveFyre for quite sometime now. We first wrote about LiveFrye founder Jordan Kretchmer’s persistence as an entrepreneur, and then showcased the early-stage company at our San Francisco event in September 2010. We last caught up with Jordan on the Delivering Happiness bus as part of our interview series. You can watch the video interview from the Tech Cocktail Delivering Happiness video interview series below.