January 16, 2008 By Mashable

Conduit Gets $8M in Series B. Moving Beyond Toolbars?

Community toolbar creator Conduit has closed its series B round of funding with Benchmark Capital, giving the company another $8 million to play around with. The funds will go towards gaining new users for its toolbar service, and broaden its portfolio of web publisher syndication solutions.

With over 140,000 publishers, including Mashable, signing on to use Conduit’s toolbar service, the company has seen a healthy amount of growth in the two years since the company launched. And in terms of Conduit’s furthered growth, we noted that the company had added a Group toolbar feature, that combined several publications into particular categories in order to have a more comprehensive syndication option in your browser’s toolbar (Mashable has been included in the Conduit Blogs toolbar, too!).

From the looks of Conduit’s funding announcement today, the company may be spreading its reach beyond just toolbars. In its desire to expand its portfolio and offer a “family of web syndication solutions” we may be seeing some announcements from Conduit in the coming months that don’t have anything to do with toolbars.

Given the personalized nature of Conduit’s existing toolbar solution, I’m curious to see how the company will grow its collection of syndication tools, and how they’ll relate back to the toolbar (if at all). Conduit has an interesting position as a marketing tool of sorts that targets the business end but still looks to achieve costumer satisfaction by way of integrated, easy-to-use tools that work with what a user already has.

Be sure to get your Mashable toolbar from Conduit here!

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