| Type | Privately held companies |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2004 |
| Headquarters | McLean, Virginia, USA |
| Key people | Ramsey McGrory, CEO Hooman Radfar, Executive Chairman & Co-founder Gar Richlin, COO |
| Website | www.clearspring.com |
Clearspring Technologies is a web technology company based in McLean, Virginia, USA. Clearspring's AddThis sharing platform reaches 1.2B unique visitors monthly and is used by over 10MM web publishers to virally distribute and track content across blogs, social networks and other web sites. Clearspring’s Audience Platform enables brands to deliver interest-based advertising to social influencers and intenders. The company has raised over $58M in venture capital from leading Internet investors Institutional Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, Steve Case, Nigel Morris, Miles Gilburne, and Ted Leonsis.
Clearspring Technologies was founded in 2004 by Carnegie Mellon University graduate students Hooman Radfar [1] and Austin Fath in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
2004: The company began as R&D and consulting concern focused on commercializing research concepts around the semantic web and social networks. Funding for the work came primarily from grants and consulting projects.
2005: With funding from friends and family, alongside a $100K investment from Idea Foundry, the team created the first Semantic Start Page. This service provided users customizable, browser-based dashboard to consume information and news. Users could add widgets from publishers across the web and share content across their social graph.
2006: The company raised a Series A investment led by Novak Biddle and ZG Ventures to fund the development of the technology developed in 2005. The team relocated the headquarters of the company to Virginia and focused on launching the first part of this platform – a widget sharing and tracking platform for publishers. This platform was called LaunchPad.
2007-2008: Clearspring grew LaunchPad into the #1 Comscore ranked platform. The company began to launch its first experimental advertising programs and NEA led an $18MM Series C investment in the company to finance their continued rapid growth. [2] In 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis LLC, the largest link sharing and tracking platform. The thesis of the acquisition was to create a single content sharing platform for publishers under one brand, AddThis. The total reach of the combined platform per Comscore was 254MM Unique Users WW.
2008-2009: Clearspring upgraded AddThis with widget-sharing capabilities from LaunchPad. The company then discontinued the LaunchPad offering. During this transition period, AddThis continued to grow and by the end of 2009, reached 600MM unique users WW.
2010: The company launched the Clearspring Audience Platform, enabling brands to deliver interest-based display advertising to users across the web. At the end of 2010, AddThis topped over 1B unique users reached monthly and is used by over 8MM unique domains. This same year, Clearspring led the creation of OExchange - the first open standard for online content sharing - alongside Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and others.
2011: In May, Clearspring raised a $20M D round of venture funding led by Institutional Venture Partners. In September, the company hired a new CEO, Ramsey McGrory, formerly of RightMedia and Yahoo!. Co-founder Hooman Radfar is now Executive Chairman. In October 2011, the company's AddThis platform turned 5 years old. In November 2011, Clearspring acquired data science company XGraph.