Good morning. Big news to announce today. We are happy and excited to announce that we just closed a $5M Series B round led by Polaris Venture Partners with our good friend Mitch Kapor joining in. Here is the full Sprout Series B press release.

So what does this mean for us? The fresh funding gives us an opportunity to bring on more people to help us continue to build Sprout. This means more engineers, business development, marketing, and support folks. See the Sprout jobs page for an idea of who we are looking for.

Raising venture capital money has it pros and cons. First off Mike at Polaris is a great guy and I am very much looking forward to working with him. Polaris is a very well respected fund and we join an impressive family of companies in our space. Things are going to change pretty quickly for us. We have been running a pretty small operation up to now and making decisions based on instincts and experience. Having a VC involved will very much drive us to formalize much of what we are doing while demanding that we have the discipline to build the company in a thoughtful and strategic manner.

Raising money is not the most important factor to our success. We can not build Sprout without the great support from our users who continue to push us to improve the platform. This Series B funding is a reflection of user adoption for Sprout and thus I want to thank you all helping us raise the money!

Ok... now back to work! We are busy planning our V 2.0 launch and the specs and wireframes are almost done. That means we will have a launch date soon. I am sooo excited about what we are working on and can't wait to share it with you all! Keep checking back here for bits of news that may "accidentally" come out :)

Early coverage from our friends:

Techcrunch
Mashable

Sprout closes $5 million series B led by Polaris Venture Partners

San Francisco – May 13, 2008 – Sprout, the premier platform for easily creating, publishing and managing rich media Web content, has closed a $5 million Series B financing led by Polaris Venture Partners. Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris, has joined Sprout’s board of directors. Existing investor Global Venture Capital (gvc) and legendary entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, also participated in the round.

Sprout is a free Web-based authoring platform that enables anyone to quickly and easily build widgets, mashups, mini-sites, banners and other forms of interactive and distributable web content. Users create “sprouts” by dragging and dropping rich media such as video, audio, images, text, shapes, and interactive services such as Twitter, Ribbit, PollDaddy and more. Sprouts can be embedded onto any Web site, blog, or social networking profile, and updates to the sprout are instantly reflected in all copies in circulation. Sprout’s customers range from individuals, organizations, and business small and large, including major record labels such as Universal Music Canada.

“While Flash content is ubiquitous on the Web, the process of creating and distributing Flash content was time consuming and required specialized skills. And integrating Flash with third party Web services and components has been near impossible. With Sprout, anyone can quickly create rich, Flash-based content that incorporates advanced components and Web services, and distribute them on the Web,” said Carnet Williams, co-founder and CEO, Sprout. A video interview with Sprout’s co-founder and CEO, Carnet Williams is available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dL33PSV-ioc.

“We’ve been on the widget bandwagon for some time now, and are thrilled to have found a team in the space to back,” noted Mike Hirshland, in a blog post ‘Why Polaris is Backing Sprout.’ “The web’s basic building block is shifting from websites to embeddable, portable chunks of content – widgets, gadgets, whatever you want to call them. Sprout has quickly established itself as the early leader for creating, launching and managing this fast-emerging content format, much like our portfolio company Allaire did with website creation a decade ago, and we think Sprout has a similar opportunity to build tremendous value.”

About Sprout

Sprout is the premier platform for easily creating, publishing and managing sophisticated rich media content on the Web. With Sprout, anyone can quickly and easily build widgets, minisites, banners and other rich media content for their blog, social networking profile or web site. Sprout is based in San Francisco, CA, and Honolulu, HI. To learn more, please visit http://www.sproutbuilder.com.

About Polaris Venture Partners

A national venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management, Polaris invests in seed, early stage and growth equity businesses in the technology, life science, digital media, enertech and consumer sectors. Other digital media investments in Polaris’ portfolio include Automattic/Wordpress, BlackArrow, Heavy, JibJab Media, Quantcast and Turbine Entertainment.

Through a philosophy of lead investing and active, long-term partnering with entrepreneurs and management teams, Polaris has helped many companies achieve outstanding success. Among them are: Accordant Health Services, Acusphere, Advanced Inhalation Research (AIR), Akamai Technologies, Allaire Corporation, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, American Superconductor, Archivas, Aspect Medical Systems, Avici Systems, Centra Software, Classifieds2000, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Cushcraft Corporation, deCODE genetics, Exchange.com, GlycoFi, Matrics, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Paradigm Genetics, Powersoft, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Solidworks, and TransForm Pharmaceuticals.