Whisper’s 5x growth has led them to a $21M Series B investment

In March 2013 we led the Series A of Whisper, an extraordinarily engaging smartphone app. The app allows users to anonymously share secrets, their text over arresting images. Other users can then read, heart and reply. Here is one on weddings:

Here is one on being in the closet:

And here is one about college:

As you can see, anonymity is key to authenticity for these sentiments. This isn’t the sort of stuff you’d put on Facebook or Twitter. And at the same time, it is incredibly compelling stuff to read. Users open the app 8-10 times a day and spend half an hour a day in the app. 45% of users create Whispers, an extraordinary ratio given that the rule of thumb for most user generated content sites is that only 1% create content. Unsurprisingly, this very high engagement leads to very high user retention and user growth.

When we invested in March the company was seeing 500M pageviews/month. Today, six months later, the company is seeing 2.5B pageviews/mth, and is announcing that it is raising a new $21M series B round.

I’m excited to have Roelof Botha from Sequoia join me on the Whisper board. I’ve known Roelof since we were in business school together and was a groomsman in his wedding ten years ago. And when I told him about Whisper a month or so ago, he “got it” right away, and he and his colleagues moved quickly and decisively to lead the new round.

We are doing more than our pro rata on this round and will continue to be the largest investor; we are very excited for the prospects of Whisper. Michael, Brad and the rest of the team are building a truly new social media company at web scale!