Another $100 Million for Facebook

Zuckerberg just reeled in another $100 million in funding to purchase another 50,000 servers to scale their service. Facebook has been able to grow its active users to over 70 million in the past 4 years with around 109 million monthly visitors. Last month the site attracted 35 million users, a 71% increase from nearly 21 million users a year ago. Recently, the site has been slow because of its fast expansion, so the capital will be used entirely for servers and will bring their total funding to nearly half a billion dollars!

Typically startups (although I wouldn't call Facebook a startup anymore) have to give up equity for their funding, in this case, Facebook is using debt. They were able to do this through a special venture lending deal with TriplePoint Capital. This type of venture lending peaked during the late 1990's, but has since been making a comeback. The type of funding is usually used for spending on fixed assets, such as the servers. According to the research firm Data Center Knowledge, they have about 10,000. This is actually peanuts compared to Google that operates at least a million servers and currently adding 500,000 per year. (Business Week)