Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

IFTTT Raises $7M Led by Andreessen Horowitz

IFTTT, the maker of handy tools that connect various Web and mobile apps together, has raised $7 million in Series A funding.

The San Francisco-based company provides connective tissue between services like Dropbox and Instagram, Twitter and Google Drive, and LinkedIn and Salesforce Chatter — and all sorts of similar combinations. Users can write rules to automatically archive their content, to receive notifications when something in particular happens or to aggregate and syndicate their own posts.

IFTTT tries to be friendly to non-geeks, but it’s still not terrifically accessible. That starts with its name, which is pronounced like “gift” without a “g.”

IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets said users have created more than 2.5 million “recipes” already, and his company is working on new projects around a self-serve platform for apps to add themselves, a consumer-friendly mobile app and ways to retroactively apply IFTTT to data from the past.

Tibbets also said he hopes that IFTTT will prove useful enough that application makers start recommending it to their own users rather than building such functionality themselves.

Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell, who is joining the IFTTT board, talked a bit about how the company fits into the social media platform wars, where services like Instagram cut competitors like Twitter out and platform makers’ changing policies often befuddle developers.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the silos,” O’Farrell said. “The silos are because these companies are very good at what they do.”

O’Farrell said Andreessen Horowitz had trouble fitting IFTTT into its consumer or enterprise investment buckets, but that was part of the company’s charm.

He further put in a plug for his firm as a Series A investor, saying it remains active at that stage of investing even as others have pulled away. Andreessen Horowitz made 12 Series A investments this year, by O’Farrell’s count, as compared to eight per year in its first two years as a firm.

IFTTT previously raised seed funding, and seed investors NEA and Lerer Ventures also participated in the Series A round.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald