San Francisco: Sprout, the premier platform for creating, publishing and managing rich media Web content, has closed a $5 million Series B financing led by Polaris Venture Partners. Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris, has joined Sprout's board of directors. Existing investor Global Venture Capital (gvc) and legendary entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, also participated in the round.

Sprout is a free Web-based authoring platform that enables anyone to quickly build widgets, mashups, mini-sites, banners and other forms of interactive and distributable web content. Users create "sprouts" by dragging and dropping rich media such as video, audio, images, text, shapes, and interactive services such as Twitter, Ribbit, PollDaddy and more. Sprouts can be embedded onto any Web site, blog, or social networking profile, and updates to the sprout are instantly reflected in all copies in circulation. Sprout's customers range from individuals, organizations, and business small and large, including major record labels such as Universal Music Canada.

"While Flash content is ubiquitous on the Web, the process of creating and distributing them was time consuming and required specialized skills. And integrating Flash with third party Web services and components has been near impossible. With Sprout, anyone can quickly create rich, Flash-based content that incorporates advanced components and Web services, and distribute them on the Web," said Carnet Williams, co-founder and CEO, Sprout.