Sprout, a Manoa-based startup attracting attention for its Web software, is getting $5 million in financing led by an East Coast-based venture capital company with a track record of technology investments.

The Series B financing will help the company hire more software developers and business staff and give it more money for marketing. Polaris Venture Partners led the financing group, which includes Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp.

Sprout has been generating a buzz in the world of widgets, which are portable bits of content such as video, audio and other rich media that can be distributed across multiple Web sites. The company is led by Carnet Williams, former executive director of Hawaii Business and Entrepreneur Acceleration Mentors, who co-founded the company at the Manoa Innovation Center.

The company, whose growth has been chronicled in a series of articles in Hawaii Business magazine, has its headquarters here and an office in San Francisco for marketing and other business purposes.

"The Web's basic building block is shifting from Web sites to embeddable, portable chunks of content — widgets, gadgets, whatever you want to call them," said Polaris general partner Mike Hirshland in a blog.

"Sprout has quickly establish itself as the early leader for creating, launching and managing this fast-emerging content format."

Todd Kurie, Sprout vice president, said the success stems from making it easy for people to build their own rich media content based on Adobe Flash. Where creating this content was once time-consuming and required special skills, the company's SproutBuilder allows people to easily create Flash-based content incorporating advanced components and Web services.

"It's about bringing Flash to the masses," Kurie said. "We consider ourselves empowering a whole new class of users."

People using Sprout's Web-based authoring platform can have their work embedded on Web sites, blogs and social networking profiles with updates instantly made to all copies in circulation. Sprout's users range from individuals to Universal Music Canada.

Kurie said Hawai'i has played an important role, with most of its original investors coming from the state. Some of these also took part in Sprout's Series A financing round that produced $3.3 million.

While some have advised Sprout to downplay its local roots and stress its West Coast office, Kurie said the company sees being here as an asset. It's helped in attracting software developers burnt out on Silicon Valley or other tech areas, he said. "It's been a great recruiting tool," Kurie said. "Hawai'i is definitely an important part of the DNA."

For now the SproutBuilder service is free, but there are plans afoot to monetize the company's work with a subscription service that will be attractive for larger users.