SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwire) — 11/29/11 — , a marketplace for freelance writers and small businesses to connect, today announced the company has raised approximately $700,000 in seed financing led by Crosslink Capital, Liveops founder Douglas Feirstein, and Shopzilla CIO Jody Mulkey.
Scripted.com has a user-base of more than 80,000 writers, with over 80 percent of those writers based in the United States. Businesses join Scripted to secure writers for a wide range of content needs from blog posts and social media posts, to newsletters, articles and copywriting. Scripted.com offers flat rates for social media posts, and blog posts up to 500 words. Scripted matches buyers to writers based on the writers- area of expertise, and writing capability, and client guidelines. Scripted manually vets writers by various criteria before they can work for business clients.
“In the age of social media, every company on the planet has an urgent need for quality content,” said Sunil Rajaraman, CEO and Co-Founder of Scripted. “We aim to help small and mid-size business owners who simply do not have the time to hire writers, vet them, and create content consistently. We already have very strong customer traction and one of the largest user bases of writers on the Internet. Our vision is to become the first place SMB businesses go to find quality content.”
“We have been following marketplaces for the last two decades and believe the stage is primed for services like Scripted to successfully disintermediate many traditional offline (and even some online) models with higher quality service at lower price points,” said Eric Chin, Partner at Crosslink Capital. “Scripted has consumed very little capital in building a marketplace around a highly valuable writer base, and we believe this is the right team to execute on that vision.”
Scripted.com is placing a strong emphasis on customer growth through 2012, and is already producing nearly 1,000 blog posts per month for commercial customers. Scripted-s customers include Author Solutions Inc, Levi-s and Mailchimp, among others. Scripted-s advisory board includes Break Media CEO Keith Richman, i/o Ventures co-founder Paul Bragiel and writer/actor/director Edward Burns.
Crosslink Capital is actively investing in marketplace companies through its Alpha Seed Program. Other investments in marketplace companies include Colingo, Kitchit Takelessons and Balance Financial.
Founded in 2011, Scripted.com is a marketplace for freelance writers. Scripted.com has a base of more than 80,000 writers located in every state in the U.S. as well as more than 50 nations around the world, fluent in multiple languages. Scripted vets writers across multiple criteria and facilitates the purchase of blog posts and social media posts for businesses. Scripted adds a new writer to its user base every 20 minutes. Scripted was launched as a subsidiary of Scripped.com (founded in 2008), the largest screenwriter community on the Internet. Scripped.com is a screenwriting software provider that crowdsources screenplays for producers, including, Edward Burns, Steven de Souza (writer of Die Hard and 48 Hours), and multiple producers from Viacom. As Scripped-s user-base grew, so did demand for non-entertainment industry content, which led to the creation of Scripted.
Crosslink Capital is a leading stage-independent venture capital and growth equity firm with over $2 billion in assets. Crosslink, which traces its roots back to 1989, was among the first and largest investment firms in the U.S. to integrate public and private growth/technology investing in three families of funds: venture capital funds, long/short hedge funds and a unique hybrid crossover fund. This strategy allows Crosslink to partner with its portfolio companies on a long-term basis. With more than 20 years behind it, Crosslink Capital has invested in over 100 private equity portfolio companies, at the early, mid, and late stages including Pandora (NYSE: P), Ancestry.com (NASDAQ: ACOM), Omniture (acquired by Adobe Systems), Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX), Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB), Intematix, SeaMicro, Synapsense, Bleecher Report, Marin Software and DataStax. For more information on Crosslink, visit .
Scripted.com
Dan Chmielewski
Madison Alexander PR
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Crosslink Capital
Isabelle Fymat
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