UPDATED 18:09 EDT / JANUARY 18 2011

Scribd Gets Another $13M, Plans for Product Expansion

Scribd, the “YouTube” for documents, has just closed a $13 million third round of funding, under the leadership of MLC Investments of Australia and SVB Capital and previous investors such as Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group. In the last four years Scribd raised about $25.8 million in total funding.

It’s not too often we discuss Scribd on SiliconANGLE, but the recent funding news presents an opportunity to discuss the expansive network, its plans moving forward, and its impact on the personal cloud. Given the steady rising of mobile phones, e-readers and tablets, such as Amazon’s Kindle, Scribd will make considerable investments in fostering its team of engineers so as to develop new products, i.e mobile apps, consumer-paid and ad-supported services.

“2011 is going to be a milestone year for us,” said Scribd CEO and co-founder Trip Adler in a statement. “As the world rapidly changes the way it reads content on the web, we are rapidly preparing to change the way we deliver what they read.” The main reason for Kindle’s popularity for example is that it synchronizes a single account across all the prominent mobile platforms, introducing the personal cloud to e-reading in an unprecedented manner.

We’re glad to see Scribd’s intentions around product expansion–the site had a bumpy start in many regards, facing criticism and scare tactics for creating a sharable, public forum for content that’s oftentimes copyrighted.  In this way, Scribd’s story has been a lot like YouTube’s, and in their similarities we can conjecture some of the many ways in which Scribd will have to expand its current feature set.  When it comes to the personal cloud, there’s certainly plenty of room for growth and monetization, especially if it looks to delve deep into the mobile sector.


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