Brian Alvey: Crowd Fusion is funded

Last week was fantastic. I was back from a week away with my family -- mentally recharged and physically drained. I had played really hard in Cape Cod and was so happy to dive back into our amazing little project.

Velocity Interactive Group released some details on Crowd Fusion's funding. Reading it now I just noticed how my contributions were edited. No offense to the other less famous people at our VC's, but my original quote was:

There's no better way to validate an early stage business like ours than to have smart people like Jon Miller, Ross Levinsohn, Alan Patricof and Marc Andreessen tell the world that they believe in what you're doing enough to partner up with you.

Thank heaven for blogs.

Of course, there are way more people working with us than those four -- specifically Ian Sigalow at Greycroft (who is now on our board) and Jorge Espinel at Velocity -- but those are some fantastic investors, don't you think? I am extremely happy with how our money raising project worked out. Jason was a great coach for me on that front.

Here are some more details on the funding:

Our valuation was "somewhere south of Facebook's".
Because Crowd Fusion didn't exist when Jon Miller left AOL, Time Warner's non-compete couldn't block him from joining our board.

But seriously, there is some confusion as to whether Crowd Fusion is a publishing company or a platform company. I'll have to do another post to clear that up better, but for now just know that we're a publishing company with our own platform and both are named Crowd Fusion. Did that help?

We are not taking on hosting customers. ComicMix and all of our personal sites are enough of a distraction. Right now we are focused on building out some sample sites so we can show people how it all works. More news on that front coming soon.

Comments (4)

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Russ Rogers 14 days ago

Congratulations on finding a "Daddy Web-Bucks" for CrowdFusion. Is ComicMix related to CrowdFusion? Is it something like a CrowdFusion test subject, whipped up in the CrowdFusion Test Kitchens? Is that how a young, upstart comics publisher ends up with the best comics reader on the web?
[Off the subject: Was Niki as disappointed with the ending of the Twilight Series as I was with the ending to Dr. Horrible? I haven't read it, but the early Amazon.com reviews were very mixed for "Breaking Dawn." [Book spoiler removed so it doesn't ruin the series for anyone else. -- Brian]]
Brian Alvey 14 days ago

Hah! I think she's on book three, but she bought book four just in case she finishes the third in the middle of the night. ;-)
Crowd Fusion is a platform company. ComicMix happens to be the only outside site that runs on it. The reader isn't really the special sauce, though. I'll give you a preview when we have something new to show.
Thanks!
Russ Rogers 14 days ago

You might not think it's the "special sauce," but, seriously, the ComicMix Reader is clever, intuitive and transparent, one of the best features of the site. The Reader might not be the "CrowdFusion Special Sauce," but it's that for ComicMix. It's not perfection ... yet. But it's less clunky than Adobe Reader. And that's the second best comics interface around, IMHO. I've said this before, the ComicMix Comics Reader is already the best comics reader I've found on the Internet.
Niki Alvey 14 days ago

Argh. I'm still on third book. Just discovered series on vacation.

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