Harbottle & Lewis advises on $500,000 Woto Funding Round

British-born tech start-up secures $500,000

Taking into consideration that 95 percent of social media posts receive little to no
social interaction, Woto.com has been created to give ‘serious sharers’ a more powerful space
from which to share their world with audiences that actually care.

Since launching the beta platform earlier this year, Woto has already attracted users in 117
countries whose pages have been viewed more than one million times, and shared on social
media more than 80,000 times.

Impressed by this wave of early adoption, the new venture today announced it has raised
$500,000 in a seed round led by Ingenious Ventures, the private equity division of Ingenious,
the UK’s largest creative industries investor and Galata Business Angels (GBA), a Turkish
business angel group.

Woto.com has previously secured investment from Zag, the corporate venturing arm of global
creative agency BBH to develop consumer propositions for its corporate client base.

The British-born startup was created by two industry experts that watched today’s social media
channels remove all of the great design elements in order to appeal to the masses. Woto is
giving these tools back to people that are serious about sharing meaningful content, to
enhance and shape their own social media presence – life doesn’t always happen in 140
characters.

Ian Collins, Co-founder of Woto comments on securing the investment: “Since 1993 we’ve
watched four waves – the first was web authoring tools, the second was content management
systems, the third was hosted content management systems, and the fourth is social
publishing.

“Woto is the fifth wave – a space that’s not constrained by a box sized post or a limited number
of characters, that enables serious sharers to shape their own content, easily, and quickly,
without limitations.”

Ekin Caglar, co-founder and CTO of Woto, said: “Social sharing has become stagnant in the
last few years, with very little innovation. Woto has a widget-based approach to delivering rich
functionality in an amazingly user-friendly way. With our platform, social sharers get the speed
and immediacy of a social app coupled with the power of a premium website builder and the
intuitiveness of a word-processor like Microsoft Word”.”

A member of the Ingenious Ventures team commented: “Ian and his team have tapped into
a way of making and sharing content which could become an essential part of the way we
interact online. Woto is just the sort of company we want to invest in and work closely
alongside: it’s small and nimble, but with huge ambitions.”

This investment will be used by Woto to publically launch its platform, further enhance its
proposition for users, and spread the word to serious sharers.
Harbottle & Lewis’ Venture Capital team, led by Tony Littner and Felix Wong, acted for
Ingenious Ventures on their investment and advised Woto when Galata Business Angels
invested.