Less than two months after launching and following rumors of an outside investment, anonymous social network app Secret today officially announced it has raised $8.6 million. That’s a little bit less than the $10 million that it was rumored to be getting, but it’s also picking up some notable partners through the investments while the two co-founders, David Byttow and Chrys Bader, remain sole members of the company’s board:
This week, we brought $8.6MM of new capital into the company from a mixture of venture capital firms and angels. We received support from Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian of Initialized Capital, MG Siegler of Google Ventures, Bing Gordon and Megan Quinn of KPCB, Chris Howard and Brad Silverberg of Fuel Capital, Vivi Nevo, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher of A-Grade Investments, David Sacks, Bill Lee, Pete Cashmore, Joe Montana, Rob Wiesenthal, Andrew Chen, and several other secret and amazing individuals, with co-founders David Byttow and Chrys Bader as sole members of the board.
TechCrunch and others had previously reported that Secret had closed a $10m round of funding at a valuation of $50 million.
While Secret’s notable organic growth over the last 45 days has been mostly among the early adopter crowd of techies, the company thinks there is a real opportunity to grow beyond its current audience. In its blog post announcing the funding, Secret also shared some insight to how people are using the app:
We’re now halfway there and have found a direct correlation between the number of friends a user has and their engagement on Secret. Notably, 75% of people with more than 5 friends come back every day. Furthermore, 90% of users that engage in a conversation come back within the week, often several times per day. Data like this reaffirms our belief that there is opportunity to build a platform around rich and unexpected conversations.
TechCrunch also reports that users are starting to see a new warning in the app. According to a co-founder, this warning is triggered whenever a name is detected in a Secret post and warns users not to defame others anonymously. The report notes that this is the first in a series of community management-focused changes coming to the app soon.
The Secret app is available to download for free on the App Store.
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Confessiondolls iphone app is way more fun and totally anonymous. The interface is beautiful and the stories are mind boggling. People seem to need an outlet like this!