Startups that run widgets on social-networking web sites are appealing to investors these days.
Less than two weeks after widget-maker Gigya cashed in $9.5 million in a preemptive Series B, JS-Kit, another maker and distributor of widgets, snatched $3.6 million in a second round led by Altos Ventures.
The company previously raised $1.2 million in Series A from The Entrepreneurs' Fund.
JS-Kit is a provider of lightweight social widgets, which counts over 550,000 installations on such sites as AOL, Evite, JetBlue, and Sun Microsystems. But unlike Slide, RockYou or Gigya, who are all about fun, “look at me” widgets, the startup focuses on more serious applications that do ratings, comments, products reviews, and polls.
“These are interesting (usually branded) pieces of content that bloggers and facebook/myspace users may choose to use to add color to their profile pages,” said JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, about the rival widgets in an email, “but JS-Kit widgets are very different. They are essentially plugins or add-ons that publishers can use to add social networking features to their site."
According to the company, the new funding will be used to expand the company’s team of 12 engineers, hire key executive people--Chris Saad, the co-founder of the DataPortability project has joined the company as an advisor,--market the widgets, and expand partnerships in the hope to reach profitability.
JS-Kit faces fierce competition from other players such as Diskus and IntenseDebate.