As any sea­soned social media man­ag­er could tell you, it’s not every day that a two-year-old social media plat­form can bag $4.4 mil­lion in start­up fund­ing. But that’s exact­ly what San Fran­cis­co-based Muzy has done, cour­tesy of Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and WPP Ven­tures, the new invest­ment arm of ad leviathan WPP Digital.

Phe­nom­e­nal growth

Maybe the fund­ing isn’t such a sur­prise when you con­sid­er how fast this baby is grow­ing. These fig­ures would delight any job­bing social media man­ag­er: Muzy has 20 mil­lion users and is adding rough­ly 1 mil­lion more every month. And it’s achieved this with­out any dis­tri­b­u­tion, pro­mo­tion or mar­ket­ing part­ners – maybe that’s why WPP got inter­est­ed (see below).

The Muzy site allows users to select from around 50 wid­gets to pub­lish con­tent on their pages. Pho­tos get the strongest empha­sis, but text, games and oth­er types of con­tent are also fea­tured. But intre­pid social media man­agers may now be ask­ing, what makes Muzy so unique? It’s all in the app. Well, to be pre­cise, it’s all in the app-with­in-app facil­i­ty, which offers ver­sa­til­i­ty to users wish­ing to express their per­son­al creativity.

And this may be what WPP, which now has a stake in the com­pa­ny, will use to mon­e­tize it.  If those wid­gets, chan­nels and maybe even the pages, too, were to attract spon­sor­ing from brands, the cash could start rolling in on a reg­u­lar basis.

Engag­ing brands

WPP Ven­tures’ Pres­i­dent, Tom Bede­car­ré, revealed that he orig­i­nal­ly met the startup’s founders, Matt Rubens (CTO) and Andrew Chen (CEO) via a friend at Andreessen Horowitz (Horowitz and Andreessen were ear­ly Muzy angel investors).  He went on:

“WPP clients are look­ing for access to the next new social plat­form, the next big mobile app. I can’t wait to intro­duce Muzy to our clients and exper­i­ment with using their con­tent pub­lish­ing tools to cre­ate brand engage­ment. As an avid entre­pre­neur, I also want to help advise the Muzy founders on mar­ket­ing and pro­mot­ing their busi­ness, which has been oper­at­ing in stealth mode to this date.  I think we can sig­nif­i­cant­ly help them boost their growth and glob­al distribution.”

In a press release, Muzy said it would put the new mon­ey into expand­ing its 10-strong team and “build out the suite of cre­ative pub­lish­ing tools for the Muzy platform.”

Looks like big devel­op­ments are afoot.