Shareaholic, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that makes browser extensions and other tools to facilitate the sharing and discovery of web content, tells TechCrunch that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Kepha Partners, and included participation from existing backers General Catalyst Partners, NextView Ventures, 500 Startups and other angel investors, who all invested in Shareaholic’s previous seed rounds. This brings the total outside capital invested in Shareaholic to $5.5 million.

Shareaholic started four years ago as a “nights and weekends” project, but has since blossomed into a full-on company with a current staff of 10 employees. The company, which began with a simple web extension to let people share content to their social networks, first garnered attention in 2008 when it won the Grand Prize in Mozilla Foundation’s Extend Firefox contest for the best Firefox add-on. Now Shareaholic has a whole suite of tools including open platform APIs for blog publishers and analytics tools for tracking audience behavior. The company says it now reaches 270 million users per month.

The new funding will be put toward hiring more staff to further build out its technology and products, Shareaholic says. The company has big ambitions for the future — last week it announced it had brought on former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata to its advisory board. At that time, Shareaholic’s CEO Jay Meattle told the Boston Business Journal’s Kyle Alspach that Stata would be used to help Shareaholic build “an open interest, influence, and intent graph at scale that rivals that of Facebook.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Michael Sheeley, the co-founder of super popular health and fitness analytics app RunKeeper, stepped down from his role as COO and Chief Product Officer at the company this week. He announced his departure in a post on his personal blog Thursday, and the news was first picked up by the Boston Business Journal.

Details around Sheeley’s abrupt departure from FitnessKeeper (RunKeeper’s parent company) are scant. In his blog post, Sheeley alluded to starting a new business, but that seems to be in the idea stage:

“…I know this is just the beginning for this company. I, however, will be moving on. I’ll still be around town, I’ll still be blogging about software and the Massachusetts start-up ecosystem. I’ll still be offering my time to help out other entrepreneurs in whatever way I can. I never say ‘no’ to meeting and helping other entrepreneurs.

For me, I’m an entrepreneur. I start businesses. I create. It is what I love to do. …stay tuned.”

Sheeley, a repeat entrepreneur who was trained as a software engineer, started developing RunKeeper with FitnessKeeper CTO Joe Bondi back in 2008. Since then, FitnessKeeper has raised $11.5 million in venture capital (most recently in a $10 million Series B round in November 2011) and is reportedly on track to employ more than 40 people this year.

We’ve reached out to FitnessKeeper and Sheeley for more details about the departure, and will update this post with any additional information we receive.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch