From Russia With Love: Twitter Confirms “Significant” Funding With DST Global
Without giving any financial details, low down in a blog post this morning, Twitter confirmed it had gotten “significant” new venture funding from DST Global of Russia, as well as from existing investors.
As AllThingsD previously reported, DST will be the biggest player in a total round of $800 million for the San Francisco microblogging site, with $400 million going to cash out employees and other shareholders. The new funding will value Twitter at $8.4 billion.
In a quote, DST’s Yuri Milner said:
“Twitter is one of the few companies that has truly changed the world. Twitter’s astonishing growth is a testament to how important it is becoming to more people every day, and why we couldn’t pass up the chance to be a bigger part of its future.”
DST has funded all the prominent Web 2.0 companies, from Facebook to Zynga to Groupon, so now it is apparently Twitter’s turn.
Here’s the full blog post from Twitter:
Your World, More Connected
Twitter continues to grow around the globe at a record pace. Just a year ago, we delivered 65 million Tweets a day. Today, we generate over 200 million Tweets per day. One year ago, there were approximately 150,000 registered Twitter apps. Now, there are more than one million that connect to Twitter. And our team has grown from 250 people to more than 600 in the past 12 months.
More importantly, Twitter is where people around the globe come to instantly connect to what’s most meaningful to them. This makes Twitter the only place in the world to get a real-time pulse on what people are thinking and doing practically anywhere.
We’ve come very far in a short time. Now we have an opportunity to expand Twitter’s reach with a significant round of funding led by the venture firm DST Global, with the participation of several of our existing investors. We will use these resources to aggressively innovate, hire more great people and invest in international expansion.
Thank you for everything you’ve done to help get us here and for inspiring us to work even harder. We can’t wait for you to see what we have planned to make Twitter even better.