subject: Twitter Value Pushed To Over $4 Billion Dollars [print this page] Since officially launched in 2006, Twitter has rose to the top as one of the popular social networking sites around the globe. With the fast-growing business, only 4 years after its launching, Twitter is gaining even more attentions from the investors. Its amazing how they turned a simple idea in such a popular product with such a cool domain hosting name. Only in two weeks, Twitters valuation has increased 25%. A lot of parties consider this fact as artificial and it will only escalate in a short time. Perhaps that parties need to look over Groupon which currently value almost three times larger within a few hours, from USD 2.5 billion to USD 6 billion.
John Doerr, one of the venture capitalist who became Intels most successful salespeople and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB)s partner mentioned that he was regretful for not suggesting KPCB to invest in Twitter earlier. He has reportedly join the bidding war to get in to Twitter in a sum of USD3 billion. According to TechCrunch, KPCB is a strong candidate to become the next investor of Twitter after previously investing in Amazon.com, AOL, Google Inc. and Zynga Mobile. Besides KPCB, Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Moscow-based investment firm, has also shown its interest to taste Twitters glorious popularity with its USD3 billions bribery. 10% stake in Facebook, 5% stake in Zynga and less than 5 % stake in Groupon are only the beginning for DST Global to broaden its investment business. Yuri Milner, DST Global CEO, mentioned that Twitter is a perfect investment target that met DSTs investment criteria.
From the internal point of view, when Twitters co-founder Evan Williams stepped down from the top of the empire around a month ago and being replaced by Dick Costolo, he challenged his successor to figure out the next directions Twitter will take. Starting from the plans to offer paid advertising for some companies to open the opportunities for the ventures to invest in it, Twitter is facing a new financial atmosphere. They might need however to enhance their webhosting as the demand for traffic is rising. Recently, Twitter announced it had signed up some companies willing to advertise there, such as Sony Pictures, Red Bull, Best Buy, and Starbucks. Until now, Twitter raised over $160 million from several ventures such as Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners.
