MyLikes raises $5.5 million, launches apps for iPhone and Android phones.
Social advertising platform MyLikes has secured $5.55 MM in Series A funding. The funding was led by Khosla Ventures. Metamorphic Ventures, LightSpeed Partners and KickLabs also invested in this round.
With this round, MyLikes’ board of directors expands to include Alex Kinnier, partner at Khosla Ventures  and Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed and Gmail and partner at Y! Combinator
MyLikes currently has nine employees, eight of whom are former Googlers. For its seed round MyLikes raised $630K from 12 angel investors, all of whom have history with Google.
The funds will be used to fuel the expansion of the company’s product and mission to make social media advertising and marketing more personal, relevant, and conversational.
The company also announced that it is launching MyLikes on the go http://mylikes.com/mobile, a mobile app that is available on the iPhone and Android platforms. MyLikes social publishers receive notifications for relevant campaigns on their smartphones, from which they can instantly publish likes.
The MyLikes mobile app allows users to take a photo of what they like (e.g., a brand, venue, product, service, retail store), tag its location and publish seamlessly via the MyLikes platform onto Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
MyLikes launched publicly in January 2010 and already boasts an impressive community of more than 180,000 social media publishers and serves 1 billion impressions on a monthly basis. The company has thousands of advertisers including major brands like the Discovery Channel, Coca Cola, Axe Hair products, Sony Music, Universal Pictures, Microsoft, 1-800-Flowers, and BH Cosmetics.
MyLikes is changing the way brand and discovery advertising is done on social media and throughout the web by letting publishers choose and write endorsements in their own voice. Social media publishers select the brands and products they genuinely like. Publishers earn money for themselves or their preferred charity with every click.
By handpicking the ads that will best fit the interests of their followers and readers, publishers protect their integrity and relationship with their readers, as well as increase the chances that ads will get clicked. It’s a win-win-win situation for all involved: advertisers get more clicks, publishers earn more money, and readers discover relevant brands and information from their favorite social media personalities.
MyLikes is a social media advertising platform that connects social publishers on the web with Advertisers. With MyLikes, social publishers choose and write endorsements in their own voice — making advertising and marketing a more personal, relevant, and conversational medium. The San Francisco-based company was founded by Bindu Reddy, former head of product management for Google Apps, and Arvind Sundarajan, former tech lead for Google’s AdSense and Gmail. For more information, please visit http://mylikes.com or follow them on Twitter @mylikes
Picture Credit: Supplied.
