Monday, October 13, 2008

Bessemer funds Flash content creator Wix

By Mass High Tech Staff

Bessemer Venture Partners has participated in the $3.5 million round of funding of online web content creation company Wix.com Inc.

Bessemer, which operates an office in Wellesley Hills, was joined in the financing by Luxembourg-based Mangrove Venture Capital. The funding is expected to fuel additional marketing and product development, company officials said.

Wix, which operates offices in Israel and New York, has raised $8.5 million in venture capital to date. The company develops an authoring platform designed for users to create, without coding, web content in Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash and publish it online.

The product includes a drag-and-drop editor that enables users to pull in any content from the web or from their own media files (video, audio, animation, text, etc.) and create web content. Since the launch of the open beta in June, Wix’s product has created more than 1,500 new web sites daily and more than 600 new widgets daily, officials said.

Last year, Bessemer Venture Partners raised the second-largest fund in the nation, attracting $1.3 billion in capital. The firm was also the third most active investor in New England during 2007, closing 38 deals, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

The firm also operates offices in New York, California, China, Israel and India.