Twitter to raise €68m in funding

New York: Twitter has trained people to compress their thoughts into 140 characters and given a public stage to dissidents in Iran and voluble stars like Shaquille O’Neal.

Now the start-up appears to have chalked up another achievement. Twitter, which has no discernible revenue, is set to raise about $100 million (€68m) of new funding that would value the company at around$1 billion (€680m), a person briefed on the company’s plans said.

For context, that is almost double the market capitalisation of Domino’s Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year. Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with running advertisements on its website, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans to begin widely running ads until 2010.