Fanzo, the Kirkland-based startup that helps sports fans keep up with the latest news, has raised another $550,000 to help fuel development of its app.
The new round comes from Smilebox founder Andrew Wright, Seattle super angels Rudy Gadre and Geoff Entress, plus a few other investors who had previously backed Fanzo. The fresh cash pushes total funding to $1.5 million for the two-year-old company, which raised a $600,000 round this past December.
Fanzo aggregates any type of sports-related content — whether it’s a breaking news article or a tweet from a star player — and then uses an algorithm for each platform based on actions like re-tweets or Facebook likes to rank the content.
The end product is a filtered feed within the Fanzo app that aggregates the most popular articles, photos, videos and posts based on social influence, instead of decisions made by an editor from a big publisher. Fanzo calls its content “fan-trending news.”
The startup, which employs six and graduated from the Windows Azure/Techstars Accelerator, will use the fresh funds to aggressively expand into other countries like Australia and the United Kingdom where it is seeing high adoption rates.
On top of the funding announcement, Fanzo also today launched its app on Android. You can download Fanzo here.
