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Secret app picks up $8.6m in funding from Google Ventures & other notable investors

Secret-appLess than two months after launching and following rumors of an outside investment, anonymous social network app Secret today officially announced it has raised $8.6 million. That’s a little bit less than the $10 million that it was rumored to be getting, but it’s also picking up some notable partners through the investments while the two co-founders, David Byttow and Chrys Bader, remain sole members of the company’s board. Part of the investment comes from Google Ventures:

This week, we brought $8.6MM of new capital into the company from a mixture of venture capital firms and angels. We received support from Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian of Initialized Capital, MG Siegler of Google Ventures, Bing Gordon and Megan Quinn of KPCB, Chris Howard and Brad Silverberg of Fuel Capital, Vivi Nevo, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher of A-Grade Investments, David SacksBill LeePete CashmoreJoe MontanaRob WiesenthalAndrew Chen, and several other secret and amazing individuals, with co-founders David Byttow and Chrys Bader as sole members of the board.

TechCrunch and others had previously reported that Secret had closed a $10m round of funding at a valuation of $50 million.

While Secret’s notable organic growth over the last 45 days has been mostly among the early adopter crowd of techies, the company thinks there is a real opportunity to grow beyond its current audience. In its blog post announcing the funding, Secret also shared some insight to how people are using the app:

We’re now halfway there and have found a direct correlation between the number of friends a user has and their engagement on Secret. Notably, 75% of people with more than 5 friends come back every day. Furthermore, 90% of users that engage in a conversation come back within the week, often several times per day. Data like this reaffirms our belief that there is opportunity to build a platform around rich and unexpected conversations.

The Secret app is available to download for free on the App Store. The company is yet to release an Android version of the app.

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Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s weekly Logic Pros series and makes music as one half of Toronto-based Makamachine.