Bit.ly Gains $10 Million In Venture Funding

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The string of numbers is longer in the bank account of URL abbreviator bit.ly, after the company on Thursday completed $10 million in Series B funding.

RRE Ventures led the financing, and general partner Eric Wiesen will join bit.ly's board. AOL Ventures also participated in the round of funding, joining existing investors such as OATV, Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg, David Shen, and betaworks.

"In 2009, bit.ly grew like crazy and started offering more ways to share and manage links (i.e. with the launch of tools like our popular sharing bookmarklet)," said John Borthwick, bit.ly CEO, in a company blog. "In 2010, bit.ly has become the most successful platform for publishers and enterprises to track engagement using their own branded short URLs."

To date, users have clicked bit.ly links more than 40.6 billion times and have shortened more than 4 billion unique URLs, according to the company. On Oct. 5, users created the most bit.ly links in the company's history, Borthwick said.

For August 2010, bit.ly was the 69th most-visited website, according to Google Doubleclick ad planner.

Earlier this year, bit.ly unveiled a white-label service and now has more than 3,000 large customers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, National Public Radio, and Pepsi. In addition, the company works with many small clients, including individuals who want their own custom URL service, said Borthwick.

"Bit.ly pro URLs now represent 7% of all the URLs circulating in the social/real-time web," he said.

The company did not address what it will use the funding for.

"We work hard every day to deliver a great service to users -- this new investment will give us the opportunity to do that even better," Borthwick said.