Scribd Closes $13M Round of Funding




Scribd, the popular service for embedding and sharing documents around the web, has just inked a deal with investors for a $13 million Series C. The round was led by MLC Investments and SVB Capital, with Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group participating.

This is the first money the four-year-old startup has taken in more than two years; its Series B was a $9 million round in December 2008. The company’s total funding to date is $26 million.

The San Francisco-based Scribd will use some of this new money for hiring new engineers — with a likely concentration on devs with mobile experience — and other key staff.

The company’s focus on mobile, with the ultimate goal being universal accessibility, is alluded to in a statement from CEO Trip Adler.

“2011 is going to be a milestone year for us,” he said. “As the world rapidly changes the way it reads, we are rapidly preparing to change the way we deliver what they read.”

SVB Capital managing director Sulu Mamdani also said in the same statement, “Smartphones are the next computer for billions of consumers, and Scribd’s aggressive expansion plans in the mobile space could bring social reading into the hands of every one of those users.

“Product growth, combined with the site’s already impressive advertising revenue, presents enormous opportunity in the year ahead.”

In fact, Scribd has been working on its mobile offering for at least the past year. In February 2010, the company rolled out a send-to-device feature intended to make its service play nicely with smartphones and e-readers.

Scribd reps say the site’s documents garner around 60 million readers each month.

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