Button Raises $12 Million to Make the App World as Interconnected as the Web
Could 2015 be the year of “deep linking?” — One startup trying to ride that wave is Button, a New York City-based company which is today announcing a $12 million Series A investment less than a year after its launch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Button's 2015 launch bet was that mobile apps would eventually interlink the way pages do on the web, and this $12 million Series A is the first institutional check on that thesis. The related coverage shows the thesis compounding rather than fading: a $20 million Series B led by Norwest two years later took total funding past $34 million, and by 2019 the company had closed a $30 million Series C at a reported $200M-plus valuation.
Button wasn't alone in reading the wave — deep-linking rival Branch raised a larger $60 million round months after Button's B, and the category later stretched outward into in-app navigation (CommandBar) and consumer-facing link tools like Linktree.
First-order effects
- Button gains roughly three years of runway from a single round to build its app-to-app linking platform before proving commercial traction, with Norwest's later involvement signaling early investors got behind a real business.
- Rival Branch's subsequent $60 million raise confirms deep linking became a funded competitive race rather than a one-company experiment, pressuring both startups to differentiate between developer plumbing and commerce monetization.
Second-order effects
- Mobile commerce apps become each other's distribution channels: whoever controls the routing layer between apps captures the referral economics, shifting pricing power from individual merchants toward the linking intermediaries.
- Developers face a choice between integrating third-party link infrastructure or building it themselves, creating an embeddable-software market where Button and Branch compete on SDK adoption inside other companies' apps.
Third-order effects
- If app-to-app linking keeps maturing along the arc these rounds trace — Series A through C, then adjacent categories like in-app search — the boundary between native apps and the open web blurs, and a persistent link-infrastructure layer sits underneath mobile commerce the way search engines sit under the web.
- The pattern also suggests platform risk: any deep-linking layer depends on Apple's and Google's OS-level policies, meaning regulatory or platform changes to app routing could reshape the entire category's economics.
The trend: Venture capital is steadily building out an interconnection layer for mobile apps, with Button's progression from seed-stage experiment to $200M-plus company marking deep linking as durable infrastructure rather than a fad.