Prospero Archive

SaaS community tool provider Mzinga has two announcements out today; a round of financing to the tune of $32.5 million and the acquisition of Prospero. The funding was led by W Capital Partners, a private equity firm, also participating in the round are institutional investors Bluecrest Capital Finance, LP, GE Equity, and Knowledge Industries, as well as members of the Mzinga management team. Mzinga will use the funding to continue the rollout of their, "Pervasive Community" strategy for workplace and customer communities.

Mzinga also has announced the acquisition of Prospero today using a percentage of the new round of funding noted above. Prospero provides white-label social networking for companies to integrate into their current Web sites. Mzinga notes that this acquisition will, "establish its position as the leader in business social media". Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Both companies are located in Massachusetts.

Once the integration process is complete, Mzinga will utilize Prospero’s platform for social networking for new clients and will offer the Prospero suite of services to current clients. From what I can put together, Mzinga focuses on education (they call it Learning 2.0) and HR social media inside a company and Prospero focuses outside the company and so this acquisition will allow Mzinga to offer a comprehensive suite to clients for both internal and external social media.

Mzinga and Prospero executives will be on Twitter beginning at 8:30AM Eastern to discuss online communities. Not sure how well Twitter will work for this kind of exchange but I guess it’s worth a try. Here are the handles:

• Aaron Strout: @astrout
• Jim Storer: @jstorerj
• Colin Browning: @crbrowning

Mzinga self-reports more than 2.8million registered users in 160 countries worldwide with 150 employees and $30M annual revenue. Prospero counts most of the major U.S. TV and newspapers as clients.

Update: Josh at RWW has additional information on the acquisition.