RockMelt Raises $30 Million Following Facebook Partnership

RockMelt Raises $30 Million Following Facebook Partnership: "

RockMelt has upped its bet that there’s a market for social web browsers, announcing a $30 million second round of funding from an all-star list of past and new investors. This comes two weeks after the company launched a version of its browser that tightly integrates with Facebook, thanks to a partnership between the two companies.

However, RockMelt doesn’t have that many users yet. On Facebook, for example, we count 384,000 monthly active users, with slightly under half of those currently coming back every day, according to our AppData tracking service. You can see a spike in users following the June 14th announcement of RockMelt’s official partnership with Facebook, though the daily active user count has dropped back to the pre-announcement level.

So, it’s the engagement of its current users that’s interesting, and that’s what investor Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz stresses in a blog post on the funding today, via the stats below.

• Over 6 hours of use per person per day


• Average of 3 chat conversations per user through RockMelt each day


• 60% of users 35 and under are active chatters, and they each send an average of 65 messages every day and 71% of the youngest cohort use chat.


• Average of 20 uses of the information flow features per person per day


• 80% of searches go through the browser’s search interface rather than a search site


• 56% of users are age 24 and under, 80% under 35.

Horowitz’s partner is not coincidentally Marc Andreessen, cofounder of seminal browser company Netscape, and a Facebook board member. The firm backed RockMelt already in its first round, and participated in this one. It is another Facebook board member, Jim Breyer, who helped lead this new round on behalf of his firm, Accel Partners, and he’ll be joining RockMelt’s board. Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is also joining the board, with his Khosla Ventures also leading the round.

With all this funding, and a tight partnership with the largest social network in the world, we expect to see RockMelt advertising itself more heavily on Facebook and off. Not unlike what Google has successfully been able to do by promoting Chrome across search and its other properties, as well as through traditional ads.

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