Bitly reportedly raising $20M and launching a viral search engine

Four-year-old link shortening service Bitly is reportedly working on raising a $20 million funding round and launching a few new products. The startup has apparently also moved out of incubator Betaworks and into its own space, reports The Verge.

If true, the round could help the company expand its link statistics service, which is a major part of its business. Bitly is more widely know for link shortening. But knowing that it couldn’t survive off that forever, it has built up enterprise analytical services to help people track where their links go on the Internet.

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Now it seems Bitly is turning to the consumer market, according to The Verge. Bitly is reportedly launching a real-time viral search engine to keep tabs on trending topics, similar to Twitter. Unlike Twitter, it wouldn’t be limited to what’s trending on one social network. The viral search could be just one of the consumer-focused services Bitly has up its sleeve that would be helped by a hefty funding round.

So far Bitly has raised $15 million from a laundry list of investors including Ron Conway, SV Angel, and AOL Ventures. The company is based in New York City.

VentureBeat has reached out to Bitly and Betaworks about the news and will update this post when we get a response.