Presentation sharing site SlideShare raises $3 million

May 8, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

SlideShare, a company that lets you upload Powerpoint presentations to the web then share them with others, has raised $3 million from Venrock. Its site has been growing increasingly fast since it launched in 2006, chief executive Rashmi Sinhahmi tells me. It now gets 4.5 million unique visitors per month, with more than 400,000 registered users that have uploaded around 300,000 presentations to date.

The site lets you do things that you’d expect from this type of social software, like vote on your favorite presentations, see lists of the most highly-voted presentations, as well as embed presentations as widgets on other web sites. It is notably now large enough that its own user base is sending back substantial online traffic to people who post presentations, according to one of its angel investors, Dave McClure.

The company competes somewhere between document-sharing sites like Scribd and Docstoc and general online presentation services like Google Presentations.

The funding will be used to build out its team, its technology, and to launch more ways of accessing content topics on the site.

For more on the company, see the embedded SlideShare presentation starring McClure, above.

Besides Venrock, investors include Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, Google employee Hal Varian, Index Partners partner Saul Klein, and entrepreneur-investors Yee Lee and Ariel Poler.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Jon
    I like Slideshare, but I am scratching my head to find the business model. At one level it is "file-sharing" (with a twist) and file sharing has been a great traffic attractor, but not a revenue maker not to mention the copyright problem.
  • @Jon: actually the business model is pretty straightforward... many people who post presentations are using them as sales & marketing tools. the presentations attract potential customers, and SlideShare drives additional traffic that turn into customers (as per my blog post, several folks get a lot more visitors from the SlideShare community than from the slide owner's traffic alone).

    think of it as the LinkedIn of widgets / presentations... people looking at those presentations tend to be from business-focused demographics, with very specific attention to content & keywords. that's a highly monetizable audience.
  • I agree. it does compete somewhere between sites like Scribd and Docstoc but after reading all about it I'm sure it offers a more beneficial service like Google Presentations.
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