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.”

Read more ››

It has been a bit of a quiet period at Sprout this past two weeks. A couple of our developers took time off to rest after the last sprint. New employees are getting settled. I have been totally focused on interviewing new team members. It is amazing how much time it takes to recruit great people for the company. We are maniacal about spending the time and energy now to make sure that everyone that joins Sprout not only has the skills and experience, but have the passion and drive to match our current culture. I have seen too many times where startups hire as fast as they can rather than hiring the best that they can. We are taking the long view on everyone that joins us. As Matthew says "hire slow, fire fast."

So what is the culture at Sprout? We try to keep it very simple. First and foremost we all respect each other. We share a common goal and vision for making Sprout a success and that means that we all roll up our sleeves and do whatever is needed. There is no "that's not my job" mentality. In Hawaii there is a word and concept called "ohana" which loosely translated means "family." That is how we work... we don't always get along, but in the end we realize that we are all in this together.

The calm before the storm is about to be over. We are working on our V2.0 roadmap and will be starting a new sprint soon for that launch. Deep breath!

Cool video that Loic and the gang at Seesmic shot last week.

Had a great dinner last night with Mike Hirshland and Ariel Poler to talk about Dog Patch and met some great folks. The theme of the evening was to talk about how startups can better work together to create a community effort for success. I think the first step is to meet good people who are all focused on the same thing.. building a great company. Last night I was in awesome company as we talked about ads, recruiting people, social graphs and other random thoughts. We started Sprout in Hawaii, but now that I am based in San Francisco, it is nice to start building a network of friends and advisers.

So what does this have to do with Sprout? Well, we are building an Internet Content Platform and in order for us to be the glue that binds content online, it is important that we continue to work with companies that are generating the raw material we need to mash together in Sprout Builder.

We sprinted the past two months to release V 1.5 and now the team is taking a deep breath to rest up for the next big push for V 2.0. We reviewed the roadmap today with Jason and it is exciting to see the new features we have planned. I can't wait until it is done!

The two week sprint of conferences is finally over and we are back at the office trying to catch up on all the leads generated while also building more capacity in the team. Todd and I sat down this morning to review four new positions in the Marketing/BD area along with expanding our SDK and Internalization teams. I can hardly believe how fast we are growing, but the time is ripe to capitalize on all the great momentum we are building. As they say, grab the opportunity with both hands.

It is easy for startup companies to grow up too fast.. without a defined strategy. Todd has been great at helping us focus on why we are hiring, not just hiring people and then finding a place for them. The key for us to to build a team that is scalable. That means having specific job responsibilities and then finding the right people to fill them.

We have been getting some nice video coverage lately so wanted to post some of them today:

This video is Ryan Stewart interviewing me at the Adobe Engage event when they launched Air/Flex. It was two weeks after our DEMO launch.

Web 2.0 has come to a close and now the work begins. I promised to not work today and rest, but I could not pass up a quick post to show off Jason being interviewed by KRON tv here in SF.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Web 2.0 EXPO BOOTH 545 -- Sprout (http://www.sproutbuilder.com/), the premier platform for easily creating, publishing and managing rich Flash content, including widgets, minisites, banners and more, today launched a Software Development Kit (SDK) allowing third parties to integrate their applications with Sprout. To learn more, visit http://www.sproutbuilder.com/developers.

Web services and developers that integrate their services with Sprout benefit by introducing their service to Sprout's growing user base, and by empowering their existing users to mashup their service within Sprout for distribution across any number of web sites. The Sprout SDK has universal appeal as it uses XML and JavaScript, making integration easy and giving users full control over the editing of custom properties.

Also announced today, Sprout v1.5 includes components for Google Forms, PollDaddy, Ribbit, Seesmic and Twitter, making it easy to collect data, survey audiences, place phone calls, or show off vlogs or Twitters directly from a sprout. Also released were several new animation effects, a new 'Help' panel with tutorials and 'how-to' videos, and an enhanced Undo/Redo/History function.

"The Sprout SDK allows all types of web services to easily integrate into our platform, joining the likes of Twitter, PollDaddy, Google, Yahoo! and others," said Carnet Williams, CEO of Sprout. "We look forward to working with additional partners on the Sprout platform."

Vrooom vrooom. The past 24 hours have been a blurr since we launched the new V1.5 of Sprout. Actually it is now V1.5.2 thanks to all the great feedback we received from you all. We appreciate your patience as we work through a couple little kinks. We made some huge changes to the underlying system to allow us to have a per page history palette and also new animations and effects.

We also got a couple really nice reviews from our blogging friends. Thanks everyone for helping Sprout bloom!

Techcrunch

Mashable

Read Write Web

Jaccblog

College Media

Zoom

After several weeks of hard work and a big sprint we are proud to announce the public release of Sprout Builder Version 1.5 today. We were lucky to get coverage from Techcrunch and Mashable this morning.. thanks guys! There are many new features that Austin will post in a Changelog, but here's a teaser:

The 1.5 release will increase the ease of use and robustness of the Sprout platform and will include the following new features:

• Undo/Redo/History: Sprout now keeps track of your last 20 actions per page in your Sprout! No more fears of moving your objects a few pixels by accident!
• Google Forms Component: Survey your users and receive feedback directly into your Google Spreadsheets
• Twitter Component: Display your Tweets directly in your Sprout!
• Ribbit Component: Make phone calls from your Sprout!
• Seesmic Video Component: Show off your Seesmic vlogs
• Help Panel: Get help, tutorials, and watch HOTWO videos while you are building your sprout.
• Animation effects: Want your videos to 'fly in from the left'? We're adding several new animation effects that you can apply your sprout's elements
• Post Sprouts to Facebook's mini-feed, events, and groups: Use the Public Sprout (seed) Page's URL to post "Facebook Shared Links"

It is Friday and there's a killer south swell hitting Hawaii. And for one of the few times this year I actually surfed this morning. I sneaked home last night catching a standby flight out of SFO and arriving home around 9 pm. I woke up early and hit Courts with Rob. Needless to say I caught my best wave of the year... a steep head high right that kept peeling all the way across to the channel. Up and down, of the top and speeding down the line. I still have a grin on my face. Even though I have spent less than two weeks home this entire year, it is good to get back and enjoy a morning out in the surf and feel the sun again.

Last week was super crazy at Adtech, but I think we really showed people there a whole new way to build Rich Interactive Content without all the fuss of programming. Here's a sample of the pitch we gave at the booth as seen by Kamla Bhatt.

Aloha,

Tonight is a big night for QA on the V1.5 release. I want to thank all our users who volunteered to help with the testing, it has been amazing to have the extra eyes on the release. The team is up late tonight putting the finishing touches on the release before our code freeze. We are going to take the next day or so to test for backwards compatibility as we added many features that touch on our core infrastructure. For those of you in SF, we have a booth at Adtech:SF this week and will also have a booth at Web 2.0 conf next week.

Our plan is to announce our launch on Monday April 21st along with some very exciting news on new partnerships in the widget ad space. Please keep an eye on the blog as we get ready to unleash Sprout V1.5 on the world. As always, thanks for all your support and we hope that Sprout continues to be a valuable tool for you to create Rich Interactive Content.