Sprout gets funded

VCMike writes about the widget space and why they are backing Sprout

Why Polaris is Backing Sprout

Back in 2006 I met Hooman Radfar and the Clearspring team, and posted that they were the most interesting company at Web 2.0 that year.

Since then, “widget” has gone from a hot buzzword to the term commonly used to describe a fundamental shift in the architecture of the World Wide Web: The web’s basic building block is shifting from a “website” with a fixed location to embeddable, portable chunks of content – widgets, gadgets, whatever you want to call them.

We’ve been on the widget bandwagon for some time now, and are thrilled to have found a team in the space to back: Sproutbuilder, who today is announcing a $5M Series B that we led. Sprout has quickly established itself as the early leader for creating, launching and managing this fast-emerging content format, much like our portfolio company Allaire did with website creation a decade ago, and we think Sprout has a similar opportunity to build tremendous value.