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Marginize Inc. has raised $650,000 in an over-subscribed seed round, the company reported today. Investors include Boston-area venture firms Longworth Venture Partners and Atlas Ventures, as well as angel investors David Cohen, founder of the Techstars incubator, and Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of Hubspot Inc.
Marginize participated in Techstars Boston this spring. Shah announced his participation in June, at the incubator’s demo day. At the time, Marginize was looking for $350,000. Since then, the social web startup saw a flood of inbound interest, said CEO Ziad Sultan, who founded the company in 2009 while an analyst at Longworth. “It was way oversubscribed,” he said. “We had to proceed carefully and think how much money do we want to raise?”
Marginize sets up a peanut gallery of sorts in the margin of almost any page on the web. It populates its sidebar window with comments culled from Twitter, where it grabs posts that contain links to the page in question. Users can become ‘curators’ of sites they visit or comment on frequently, through accumulating points when other users ‘like’ their comments. Mass High Tech was the first media outlet to report on the startup, in a January profile.
“I want to present two options to every user in the world on the web,” Sultan said. “One option is you only see what the site has to say. The other option is you see the site and what the rest of the world has to say. I want to make it a no-brainer to choose the second option.”
Sultan hopes he can eliminate the challenge of amassing a significant population of users by piggybacking on Twitter’s huge user base. If he can do that, he believes the service will generate value for users, but he declined to discuss specific revenue plans.
“There’s a component of Foursquare for the web,” Sultan said. “Foursquare is a game. It’s very valuable, but the web is an equally important space in terms of the places you go to. Your abililty to share that you go often to Mass High Tech – you check in every day – is equally important that you’re broadcasting that you go to Starbucks near your house. I would argue it’s more important.”
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