Livefyre

History

Livefyre was launched by Jordan Kretchmer and Henry Arlander in December 2009. Kretchmer founded the company on the premise that static comment sections had become disconnected from conversations taking place on social networks. It began as a commenting platform for bloggers. The company's commenting platform, Livefyre Comments 3, was launched in July 2012.

In September 2012, Livefyre launched StreamHub, a platform that extended its commenting system with live blogging, live chat, and real-time curation of social media content into publisher websites. Its real-time tools were adopted by major media companies including The New York Times, CBS, Fox, NBCUniversal, and Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and news outlets such as CNN and Fox News used the platform to display live comment streams during events such as political debates. In August 2013, Livefyre launched its Social Native Ad Solutions group. In November 2014, Livefyre launched a content marketing and engagement marketing platform called Livefyre Studio.

On September 9, 2013, Livefyre purchased the social media service Storify. At that time approximately 850,000 journalists, agencies and brands used Storify to curate collections of social media content. In November 2013, Livefyre acquired the social analytics platform Realtidbits.

In February 2015, Livefyre announced $47 million in new funding, consisting of a $15 million addition to its Series C round and a $32 million Series D round led by Adobe and Salesforce Ventures, reported as the first joint investment by the two companies. The funding brought the company's total raised to approximately $67 million; at the time, Livefyre served about 1,500 customers, including AOL, Condé Nast, Sony PlayStation, and Universal Music Group. By early 2016, the company had repositioned its products as the "Livefyre Engagement Cloud", comprising a user-generated content repository called Social Library alongside conversation and visualization applications, reflecting a shift in focus from publisher comment sections toward user-generated content marketing for brands.

In May 2016, Adobe Systems purchased Livefyre. At the time of the acquisition, Livefyre had roughly 150 employees, and its technology was integrated into Adobe Experience Manager and the Adobe Marketing Cloud. In October 2016, Livefyre shut down its Community Comments WordPress plugin in order to focus exclusively on enterprise-level customers.