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Twitter raises $200m as it is valued at $3.7bn
Cash injection from venture captialists allows the site to concentrate on becoming a money making business
Microblogging website Twitter has been handed $200m from backers led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which counts former US vice president Al Gore among its partners, as it bids to expand its operations and become profitable.
The deal also values the site at $3.7bn, a figure which suggests that, less than a year after Twitter first started its attempts to make money, investors are confident that it will succeed - even though it is currently thought to make less than £100m a year.
The latest round of financing has led to renewed speculation that the website, which has 175m users, could go public, although analysts were divided on when such a move would take place.
KPCB, whose slogan is "in search of the next big idea", has a track record of backing successful online ventures. It has ploughed money into Google and Amazon, and the cash injection for Twitter more than doubles the amount of money that the website had raised from investors since it was created in 2007.
In a statement the company also revealed that it had hired two new board members, FlipBoard chief executive Mike McCue and the chief excutive of DoubleClick, David Rosenblatt.
It said: "The experience these new directors bring to Twitter, along with this renewed investment, will help us continue to grow as a company and business."
In recent months Twitter has begun attempts to monetise itself, but its efforts have proved controversial. Some users were angered by promoted links and the arrival of multimedia content on the hitherto simple site, while celebrities have been criticised for accepting money from sponsors to promote products via tweets.
The investment from outside sources has also allowed the company to triple the number of people it employees since the start of the year.
Despite its growth and plans for the future Twitter still has some way to go before it can consider itself a rival to social networking behemoth Facebook, which is valued at a staggering $45bn. ·
