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Investors Jeffrey Bussgang, a partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, and John Prendergast, a former investment banker and entrepreneur, have confirmed their involvement in a $1.6 million round of equity funding for Oneforty Inc., the Twitter-related startup founded by Boston social media consultant Laura Fitton.
The financing was first disclosed in a regulatory document posted Friday afternoon.
Prendergast said for him it’s an investment in the value of metadata and the ecommerce potential of real-time search.
“Data is valuable, but the trend analytics, the data about data, is incredibly valuable,” he said. “They (Oneforty) see the value of applications in a way that other people don’t. They sit at the nexus of (Twitter) what will likely become another great ecommerce platform in some of the same ways that Ebay became a great ecommerce platform.”
Prendergast, a former banker at Jefferies & Co. and a serial entrepreneur since the 1990s, said there is ecommerce happening on Twitter today, and Fitton and her company are uniquely positioned to be early spotters of trends in the social microblogging service’s evolving online commerce activity. He said advertisers and sellers will pay for access to the data being fed through Twitter, much in the same way Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) have paid to index the service’s postings in their search results, according to a Bloomberg News report published Monday.
“Think of it as the real-time web moreso than Twitter per se, and I think it’s easier to see,” Prendergast said. “If you think about what Google and Microsoft have done cutting those deals with Twitter, they’re seeing the value of that real-time web and in some ways that’s the beginning of this metadata thing.”
Bussgang could not be reached for this article, but he confirmed Flybridge’s investment in a post to Twitter on Saturday.
Bussgang and Prendergast are joining Oneforty’s board of directors, according to the regulatory document in which the financing was first disclosed. Prendergast confirmed he has joined the board, formalizing an advisory relationship that has existed since Oneforty was a participant in the TechStars incubator program this summer.
Fitton, who goes by the handle @pistachio on the social micro-blogging service Twitter, founded Oneforty to develop an online store for Twitter-related applications, akin to Apple Inc.’s iPhone App Store. Oneforty in June secured about $250,000 in seed funds from a list of seven angel investors, including Côme Laguë, Maurice Werdegar, Don Hutchison, John Landry, Bob Zipp, Jeff Bennett and Chris Bucchere. Reached last week, Fitton declined to comment on the financing.
According to the SEC filing, the startup’s latest financing is a tranche of a $2.3 million round. Fitton declined to comment on the Brighton-based startup’s prospects for growth, beyond to say she plans to hire with the funds.
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