SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter Inc.’s founders now have a billion-dollar baby, and they seem determined to raise it without a corporate parent.
That was the message underlying last week’s news that Twitter has lined up $100 million to finance its operations while founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone plot ways to make money off one of the Internet’s most popular communications tools.
The investment values the 3-year-old company at $1 billion, even though it has yet to generate any meaningful revenue, let alone profits.
Twitter itself didn’t provide specifics about the size of the investment, saying only that it involved a significant sum. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations confirmed the amounts to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the parties had agreed not to announce the specifics.
Williams and Stone declined an interview request.
The latest stakes were sold to three of Twitter’s existing investors — Benchmark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Spark Capital — and two new shareholders, Insight Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price.
San Francisco-based Twitter had previously raised $55 million, with the latest infusion of $35 million coming just seven months ago.
With so much money in the bank, Twitter now has the means to buy more computers and keep improving the reliability of its outage-prone service. It can expand its workforce of 60 employees without feeling the pressure to sell to a larger company.
“This is a smart move by Twitter because it buys them more time to capitalize on their momentum and come up with a business plan,” said Ken Marlin, a technology investment banker in New York with Marlin & Associates.
