In September we wrote about Safeguard Scientific‘s investment in Swaptree. Safeguard (NYSE: SFE) released some more information about it yesterday in its Q3 earnings call:
“Swaptree is the largest integrated on-line platform for trading books, CDs, DVDs and video games. It continues to grow its user base and continues its leadership in the market. In addition, the company is moving to initial revenue stage in 2010. Safeguard deployed $3.4 million of capital in Swaptree in July of last year and we own a 29% stake.”
This means Swaptree was valued at $11.72 million.
As an industry leading blog about consumer bartering, we are compelled to point out that Swaptree isn’t the largest barter platform of books, it’s second to Paperbackswap. But we’ll forgive Safeguard Scientific a little spin since second place is pretty great too. Swaptree is the first to raise institutional capital in what we call the second wave of online consumer barter activity. It’s definitely a leader and we hail to it :).
A full transcript of Safeguard Scientific’s call can be found here. A webcast and podcast of it are available here.
drew said
swaptree is in fact the largest site for trading GAMES, dvds, cds, and books. PBS does not trade games.