Slide raises $50 Mn funding

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San Fransisco: Slide, a U.S based social network software developer said it had closed a $50 million institutional financing round, marking the rising valuations of start-ups riding fast-growing Facebook's wave of popularity. Slide developed some of the hottest programs running on Facebook and MySpace, including media-sharing applications. Max Levchin, founder of Slide, declined to name the investors. However sources close to the deal said the companies were Fidelity Investments and T Rowe Price. According to Dow Jones investment tracking unit VentureOne, the round is nearly 10 times the size of the median round of $5.18 million for Web 2.0 firms in the first half of 2007.This follows the roughly $500 million recently raised by Facebook from Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, giving it an implied $15 billion valuation. Slide is among the first companies to capitalize on the success of Facebook and MySpace in becoming central stages for consumer Web use, playing the role of Windows in the personal computer era or the Netscape browser in the early Web days. "We believe there is a huge opportunity to build this next set of businesses," said Levchin. Levchin said the new cash will fund accelerated development of products and features, both on Facebook and the soon-to-be-upgraded MySpace platform, while hiring should grow from its current 65 employees to 100 this year. Acquisitions are a low priority but not out of the question, he added.