OnSwipe secures $5 million to kill apps

Tablet publishing company wants your content to look great on every device with a touchscreen

Tablet publishing company OnSwipe said Friday that it has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Spark Capital, with participation from Lightbank, Lerer Ventures, Yuri Milner and Thrive Capital.

(With a bit of Groupon’s style of lighthearted humor, OnSwipe actually wrote up its legal documents to say the round is a “Series Awesome.” If all goes well for the company, it won’t be too long before we hear about their Series Beautiful or Series Badass.)

Previous investors in the company include Betaworks and ENIAC Ventures, along with several angel investors: Dharmesh Shah (co-founder and CEO of Hubspot), Jennifer Lum (former VP at Quattro and co-founder of Apricot Capital), Roy Rodenstein (founder and EVP of Going.com) and Wayne Chang (creator of i2hub).

OnSwipe is a New York City startup working to make tablet publishing “insanely easy.” It’s not just about tablets, though; it’s about the entire mobile experience. The company promises its publisher clients that their content will work the way they want on all touch devices, which includes everything from Apple iPhones to Google Android tablets.

In tandem with the ability to publish content on tablets, OnSwipe clients also gain access to an advertising platform to make “boatloads of money,” as OnSwipe puts it.

Through a partnership with WordPress.com, the company already powers more than 18.5 million websites (with tens of thousands in the queue), but the full OnSwipe platform launches on June 21.

The ideas behind OnSwipe are simple, but its creators and investors believe it can be a huge disruption to the industry.

“Apps are bullshit and publishers don’t want to be beholden to them,” writes Jason L. Baptiste, CEO and co-founder of OnSwipe, on the company blog. “Advertisers want something more like print and less like bottom of the barrel CPM or Google Adwords. Our landing page has been and still really is pretty vague. People sort of know what we do, but the notions behind it have gotten a lot of people excited.”

With this new funding under its belt, OnSwipe will focus on fleshing out its engineering team to be the very best at HTML5. After all, that’s what killing apps is all about: creating an incredible mobile browser experience that works on any device.