Belgian startup raises $910,000 in early-stage funding from Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Index Ventures, Betaworks, Seedcamp and angel investors; joins New York tech scene.

The rise of social media has resulted in an ever-growing army of online micro-publishers. People from all over the world are growing increasingly accustomed to sharing what goes on in their lives, and their minds, through status updates on services like Twitter and Facebook or Web-based blogging tools like WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr.

Checkthis believes there is room for a service that lets people publish more than just a throw-away status update, but without the need to start a full-fledged blog. A simple but powerful way to rapidly share something temporary, but with the ability to leverage existing social networks for people to form a community around the content.

Checkthis has built a fast, powerful online application that lets people create, publish and spread a single, beautiful, personalized webpage to say what they have to say in an open letter, set up a quick poll, sell one or more items, invite friends to a party, or whatever else they can imagine.

Checkthis pages can be published and engaged with in mere seconds and can easily be shared with friends by leveraging existing social networking services like Facebook and Twitter.

No registration, no clutter, no set-up, no ‘save’ button, no sidebar widgets, no theme picking -- and with the utmost respect for user privacy.“We think of checkthis pages as interactive posters in the cloud. There are numerous ways to quickly share a status update, set up a blog or create your own website, but there remain significant barriers to entry and inherent constraints with most services that checkthis aims to remove,” said Frédéric della Faille, founder and CEO of checkthis. “Photo sharing on the web was supposed to be a solved problem as well, and then Instagram came along and garnered dozens of millions of users with a beautiful, innovative product that removed a lot of the friction that was still involved. Our goal is to do the same in the social publishing space.

”Launched quietly in October 2011 without any marketing, there are 4,000 pages being created per month, and social engagement is high (260+ pageviews per page on average).

To support the launch of the service in public beta, checkthis has recently received backing from an impressive mix of investors from across the United States and Europe. After starting conversations with investors in January 2012, checkthis secured $910,000 in an oversubscribed early-stage financing round in May 2012.

The funding round was led by New York-based Lerer Ventures with participation from SV Angel, Index Ventures, Betaworks, Seedcamp, Hudson River Angels and angel investors Taavet Hinrikus (early Skype employee; founder of TransferWise) and GroupMe co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci.

Checkthis advisors include Tim Van Damme (Instagram), François de Halleux (Google) and Robin Wauters (The Next Web).

Checkthis will use the capital to move its offices from Brussels, Belgium to New York City, ramp up hiring and double down on the development of its next-generation online publishing software.