Six Apart, a provider of blogging software, said this week that it had received about $12 million in a third round of funding for use in new products, international expansion and network growth.
Barak Berkowitz, chief executive of the San Francisco-based company said this brings the funding Six Apart has raised to roughly $23 million since its founding four years ago by Ben and Mena Trott, a husband and wife team.
Six Apart plans to use the financing in part to help launch a new service, code-named Comet.
The service aims to extend the blog and social networking craze among young people to an older, more mainstream crowd looking to create private text- and photo-sharing sites for their families and friends, Berkowitz said.
"The more we build the business, the more we see opportunity to build out in new directions," Berkowitz said in a phone interview.
Six Apart also is looking to expand the use of blogging as a way for office workers to collaborate inside their organizations, in contrast to personal blogs, whose audience is typically friends, other bloggers or the wider public.
Internationally, the company is looking to expand in the corporate market in China, he said, building on early success through partners in the commercial Japanese blogging market.
Earlier this week, Six Apart said it acquired SplashBlog, a supplier of mobile blogging software via cell phones used in Europe and the Americas.
Existing services include Movable Type, the software that powers many of the world's most popular blogs, TypePad, a quick-to-set-up subscription service, and LiveJournal, a Web site publishing community popular with teenage girls.
More than 15 million people around the world have used Six Apart's blogging software to publish personal and corporate Web sites.
The latest round was led by Focus Ventures, an expansion-stage venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., which has backed dozens of software and other technology companies.
Also taking part were Intel Capital, the venture arm of the world's biggest chipmaker and a prolific investor across the technology arena, and prior Six Apart investor August Capital, an active Internet investor based in Menlo Park, Calif.
Six Apart has about 130 employees.
