Press - Dow Jones VentureWire 031808

Content Finder LightPole Shines On $2M Series A

Dow Jones VentureWire
Written by Timothy Hay
Tuesday, March 18, 2008

As more mobile users look to get beyond the “valley of death” offered by traditional carrier networks, demand is growing for applications that link independent content publishers with the growing mobile audience.

Such is the philosophy of LightPole Inc., a San Francisco-based “discovery software” company that has just raised its first institutional round, a $2 million infusion from early-stage investor Alloy Ventures and Stanford University.

“It's been very difficult to innovate,” said Doug Klein, chief executive of the 15-employee company. “It’s the valley of death. Everything is controlled by the carriers... How do publishers find distribution?”

One way, he said, is LightPole.

LightPole trolls the Internet for interesting content — most of it specific to location — and offers it to mobile users with a map-based interface, Klein said.

“Our software is a location-aware browser,” Klein said. “We are simply helping people find third-party content.”

LightPole partner HotSpotr.com, for example, which offers maps of wireless hot spots listed by city, has embedded a LightPole widget on its Web page. A HotSpotr user simply clicks on the widget to get the service beamed to their mobile device.

Other LightPole partners include the Bathroom Diaries site, where user-created reviews of public bathrooms give travelers a heads-up about cleanliness, accessibility and other important issues.

The $2 million Series A closed last month. LightPole had a previous $500,000 round from angels, Klein said.

The Series A will go toward fine-tuning the application and finding new content partners, said Klein, who declined to give a valuation for the company.