14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the great marketing campaign that preceded its launch, Rockmelt did not succeed into attracting a huge userbase. It did manage to land a partnership with the most popular social network of the moment and it also raised $30 million from investors.
From the very beginning, Rockmelt aimed to function as a social browser that would make it “easy to stay in touch with friends, search online, and get updates” from various sites.
After gathering $9.9 million in first round of funding, the Rockmelt team announced that they improved Facebook integration due to a partnership with the social network.
Consequently, more investors became interested in the company, which is reflected in the amount of money raised in the second round of funding.
Along with the existing investor Andreessen Horowitz, two other parties showed their interest: Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures.
Following this investment, a representative of each of the new firms will be joining the board of directors as observers, namely Jim Breyer and Vinod Khosla, respectively.
Eric Vishria, Co-founder & CEO of RockMelt, explains this decision: “Re-inventing the browser is an extremely ambitious endeavor and we knew from the beginning that we'd need the sharpest minds working with us.”
Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has published a lengthy post on his personal blog regarding the evolution of Rockmelt since it was officially launched.
While the numbers may not seem impressive at first, for a person to spend more than 6 hours a day using a rather new browser is actually an achievement.
It also seems that Rockmelt appeals especially to the young audience (56% of users are age 24 and under, while a staggering 80% are under 35), as the veterans choose to rely on the more traditional browsers for accessing social networks.
Even though it is undoubtedly designed to meet the needs of social web users, Rockmelt will need a lot of promoting and innovation to prove that it can be considered a worthy opponent to the likes of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Opera.