Two not-terribly-similar startups, Trapit and Addvocate, announced today that they’re merging.
Trapit co-founder and CEO Gary Griffiths will now serve as CEO of the combined company, which has the unwieldy name Addvocate-Trapit. Griffith told me they put off coming up with a more streamlined name “until we’re fully integrated on the product side.” The rest of the management team comes primarily from Trapit, he said, with co-founder Hank Nothhaft remaining as chief product officer.
The company is also announcing today that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding.
As a refresher, Trapit spun out from SRI International (which was also where Siri started), and it used artificial intelligence to build what was, in many ways, a Flipboard competitor, gathering topic-based content from around the web. It also allowed publishers to create customized, standalone versions of the Trapit experience.
As for Addvocate, it was building tools to help businesses coordinate how employees promote their companies on social media. (Addvocate co-founder and CEO Marcus Nelson left earlier this year.)
So why bring the companies together? It’s about creating a combined platform for content marketing, which basically means connecting with consumers by producing and sharing content that’s actually good (or at least not just promotional). It’s an industry where Griffiths said there are a lot of companies that “have their oars in the water,” but he argued, “In virtually all of the other applications, we’ve seen a dearth of the ability to find truly relevant content.”
Finding that content is what Trapit is good at, and once it’s integrated with Addvocate, they can promote the content after they find it, too.
Griffiths also said that Trapit had been looking to raise a Series B when Addvocate investor Rogers Venture Partners connected the two companies.
“We were already going down the advocacy path,” he added. “This just made perfect sense for us — instead of trying to build all that ourselves, we inherit a team that’s already familiar with it.”
The Series B was led by Rogers, with participation from Trapit’s previous backers, including Asian TV conglomerate Astro Digital. The combined company will have a team of about 40 people, Griffiths said.
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