SmallRivers Announces $2.1M Financing Round to Expand Paper.li Globally

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, January 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- SmallRivers SA, creator of Paper.li, the leading social news publication application, today announced that it has raised $2.1 million in financing from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital and Endeavour Vision. In conjunction with the financing, Dan Nova of Highland Capital Partners and Ronald Fisher of SoftBank Capital will join the Company's board of directors.

"Paper.li has generated extraordinary traction since its launch, and we are thrilled to welcome these world-class venture capital firms as investors," said Edouard Lambelet, President and CEO of SmallRivers. "Our new partners will be instrumental in helping us to enhance our team, build strong partnerships with major service and content providers, establish operations in the US and Asia, and accelerate growth on all continents."

Paper.li aggregates, curates, categorizes and transforms social media news and activity streams from Twitter and Facebook into personalized online newspapers. Each newspaper provides a simple and homogeneous news discovery experience, based on focused relevance from a broad pool of content. Launched last summer, Paper.li currently has 2 million unique users, operates in four languages (English, Spanish, German and French) and publishes 140,000 user-created daily newspapers. http://www.paper.li

"Harnessing the convergence of the semantic and social web, Paper.li is at the forefront of the emerging 'social curation' market," stated Dan Nova, General Partner at Highland. "Paper.li represents the next wave of publishing by matching context and content from diverse streams of social media information and packaging it in an easier to consume manner."

Added Ronald Fisher, Managing Partner at SoftBank Capital: "Paper.li is revolutionizing the consumption of information through an innovative publishing model that leverages machine learning capabilities and semantic search. We're excited to be part of the team as the application is rolled out globally."

In addition, SmallRivers is planning to move part of its team from Switzerland to California. More details will be announced later this year.

For more details about SmallRivers, Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital and Endeavour Vision, visit: http://blog.paper.li/2011/01/smallrivers-announces-21m-financing.html

    
    SmallRivers SA
    Swiss Federal Institute of Technology- PSE
    1015 Lausanne
    Switzerland
    Edouard Lambelet
    +41-79-410-09-94
    edouard.lambelet@smallrivers.com