Sponto Completes Initial Financing Led by Amplifier Ventures

WASHINGTON, March 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Sponto, a mobile party discovery app for college students, announced the completion of a $200,000 initial equity financing led by McLean, VA based Amplifier Ventures.  The funding will be used to complete the first commercial release of the Sponto event-sharing platform, to expand to new schools, and to grow its software development team.  As part of the investment, Sponto has joined the Amplifier Business Accelerator Program.

"This investment will let us accelerate our company's growth," said Jamey Harvey, Sponto's CEO and co-founder. "College students are looking for a way to manage their social and personal lives on their most used platform – the mobile device.  We let them do that without having to worry about being friended by their adult relatives."  The company intends to commercially launch its next generation offering on Android, iPhone and Blackberry in Washington, DC universities in the second quarter, and extend to other markets in time for the fall.

"Sponto lets students know 'where the action' is in real time, join in, publicize and meet up.  We like mobile investments that offer users meaningful utility and value," said Jonathan Aberman, Managing Director, Amplifier Ventures.  "As the industry of real-time offers and couponing matures, a check-in free platform like Sponto offers advertisers the best opportunity to provide customers with location-based content at the right time and place."

Sponto launched the first generation of its Android, iPhone and Blackberry apps exclusively at the University of Maryland late 2010 and has more than doubled its active user base since integrating with Facebook in March 2011.  The company has published tens of thousands of events while creating the most sophisticated spatial and temporal predictive model of a University community ever compiled.

About Sponto

Sponto is an always-on, social-local-mobile (so/lo/mo) platform exclusively for college students to publish, discover and even detect social events and parties in secure private groups around campus.  Sponto allows students to see everything happening of interest in and around their campuses, in real time.  It's literally a social omniscience platform for college kids; a crystal ball that allows students to know what's happening with everybody in their social network, in their vicinity, in real time.  Sponto is based in Washington, DC, and is a currently enrolled in the Amplifier Business Accelerator Program. For  information, visit www.sponto.com.

About Amplifier Ventures

Amplifier Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund that has been operating since 2005. It has 11 current investments, including Bright Hub, Cardstar, Hook Mobile, Ozmosis, Small Act and Zenoss.  Amplifier's national footprint includes resources in Boulder, Colorado; Research Triangle, North Carolina; Silicon Valley and Washington, DC.  Its investment model is generally to be the first institutional investor in the companies that it finances.  For information, visit www.amplifierventures.com.

SOURCE Sponto