On March 6th, former InSITE company Branch (previously Roundtable) announced that they had closed a $2M round led by Obvious Corp, Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. As part of the deal, Obvious will “join forces [with Branch] on the technology, the product design, the branding, the marketing, and several other aspects of this interesting new product bursting with potential.”
Led by Josh Miller, Hursh Agrawal, and Cemre Güngör, Branch launched last summer as a “group blogging/debate platform.” Of their time with InSITE, Josh said “When we were heads down, obsessively tinkering with in the details of our product, it was very helpful to have the InSITE folks there to help us understand the ins and outs of the financing process.”
With a lot of initial buzz and some heavy hitting advisors, the Branch team has stayed true to their initial vision as a place for meaningful conversations online. Biz Stone’s announcement of the deal describes Branch as a platform that…
… enables a smart new brand of high quality public discourse. Curated groups of people are invited to engage around issues in which they are knowledgeable. This service holds the promise of a new platform for dialogue on the web—a necessary departure from the monologues we have grown so accustomed to reading online.
For the last several months Branch has been working in San Francisco to prepare for their beta launch at SXSW. They’ll continue working out of the Obvious Corp offices there until they return to New York this summer to take up residence in Betaworks.
Congratulations to Josh, Hursh, and Cemre on their recent success and best of luck as they “turn the Internet’s monologues into dialogues
Post written by Owen Kirshner.
