Livefyre raises $800K to break down comment silos

Livefyre, a startup preparing to launch its new system for managing comments across the Web, announced today that it has raised $800,000 in a first round of funding.

The San Francisco company says its goal is to break down the silos between the different conversations happening online. It offers an embeddable comment system featuring game mechanics, user reputation, and semantic technology to alert users to related conversations on other blogs.

Existing commenting services offer some similar features. For example, Disqus, which is used by VentureBeat, includes a reputation system across sites. But I haven’t heard of any company that combines all the elements that Livefyre says it does. In Livefyre’s press release, Chief Technology Officer Justin Karneges highlights one other difference — the speed that comes from the company’s XMPP architecture.

“While other comment platforms claim to be live, they are really just refreshing themselves every so often to pull in new comments, which means they can’t support actual live conversations,” Karneges said.

The round was led by Hillsven Capital with participation from Zelkova Ventures and ff Asset Management, as well as angel investors Travis Kalanick and Paige Craig.

Livefyre said it will offer a free version for individual bloggers and paid versions for larger publishers. It has signed up 200 bloggers and publishers so far and plans to start embedding on sites on July 24.

[via TechCrunch]

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