Blogging platform provider Medium raises $50m Series C
Blogging platform provider Medium (A Medium Corporation) has raised $50 million Series C in a round led by Spark Capital that included Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures.
According to Re/Code the round was raised on a $600 million valuation, up from the $400 million valuation it had when it raised a $57 million Series B round in September 2015.
Founded in 2011 by Ev Williams and Biz Stone, both best known as the founders of Twitter, Inc., and before that the now Google-owned Blogger, the site offers a blogging platform that is billed as a place that “connects people, stories, and ideas that matter.”
Medium offers a blogging service that attempts to define itself as being different primarily through the delivery of a platform that is “simple, beautiful, collaborative” with the added bonus of content discovery: both in discovering what other people are writing about, and if you’re a user of the site, having your content shared to others who use Medium.
“Though we raised our Series B of $57M just last September, we decided to bolster our resources now given the demand we’ve seen for the vision we are building toward,” Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Ev Williams said in a blog post (naturally) on Medium. We’re dedicated to building the best platform ever created for great ideas and stories to be launched into the world — and for people to find those stories and ideas that matter to them. Which means, as far as we’ve come, we have much more to do.”
Tortoise and hare
Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and hare is well known as in the end the tortoise, which goes slowly, eventually wins the race, and in this case, Medium is the tortoise.
We’ve been critical of them previously for lacking a business plan, or more specifically a plan that involves them making money, any money at all, but to their credit they have made some small changes since their last round, including news in March that they were admittedly “building monetization into the product right now,” although in April we’re still not entirely sure what that means.
Williams and Stone are playing the long game with the service, given they’ve already had two successful startups. If you were betting money on the chances of Medium being successful, you’d have to say that it’s highly like to be third time the charm.
Include the new round, Medium has raised $132 million to date.
Image credit: scobleizer/Flickr/CC by 2.0
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