Mashable takes a big step forward today with its first ever capital raise. The $13.3 million Series A led by Updata Partners also includes New Market Ventures Partners, Social Starts, Buddy Media co-founders Michael and Kass Lazerow, Elio Leoni Sceti, CEO of Iglo Group and tech private investor, and David Jones, Global CEO of Havas and Founder of One Young World.
It’s been quite a journey since I started Mashable in rural Scotland as a teenager, keen to immerse myself in the web revolution that was transforming our lives. I threw myself into the world of new media, fascinated by an industry with seemingly limitless possibility.
Along the route, the Mashable team met thousands of others who shared our passion for the web and its extraordinary capacity to connect people. Some of those people believed so intensely in the power of communities to reshape media that they jumped aboard, helping to build the Mashable community first to millions of readers and then to tens of millions. We would tell stories of how technology was changing lives, all the while seeing our own lives and careers transformed by it.
I’m immensely proud of how much our team has accomplished. Without a dollar of funding, we have built an online publication that delivers news, resources, analysis and feature reporting to a community that has grown to more than 30 million monthly readers. Our team has swelled to more than 120 full-time employees. What’s more, we’ve moved out of our bedrooms and into offices in New York and San Francisco, and soon Los Angeles and London.
Our community looks to us every day for inspirational and informative stories that define the importance of digital innovation. And what a remarkable community you are! You are some of the most connected and influential people online. You are the generation shaping the information revolution; it’s a movement that gains more momentum every day. And as the pace of technology grows ever quicker, so too does the need to make sense of it.
I'm also excited we've decided to pave our own path through this media world by investing strategically in our product team, to build a beautiful responsive site, and develop our own proprietary technology platforms. With new capabilities, we've developed in data science and artificial intelligence, we've been able to create products like Mashable Velocity — our viral prediction platform — and have ambitious plans for the future.
I’m just as humbled that the world’s top brands look to Mashable to create innovative, inspirational and engaging advertising. And for the past year, we’ve developed our BrandLab that works hand in hand with brands to help them tell their stories more effectively using social media, all while launching innovative new products such as Mashable Lift. With an influx of talent to our sales and technology team, these products hold great promise.
Walking around our office today, I’m both impressed and humbled by the strength, experience and dedication of our team. From our growing roster of news-breaking journalists to our experts in social and community development, it’s a rare feat for a media company to experience rapid and sustained growth during eight years of industry transition; It is even rarer to do so without external funding.
From this solid footing, we take our next step. I’ve never been more confident in the foundation we’ve set, nor more convinced of the need to build upon it. In Updata, we’ve found an investment partner that shares our vision for the future of media and our passion for putting our community first.
From the development of innovative new storytelling methods, to investments in video, long-form journalism and international expansion, to growing our BrandLab, the opportunities in media are more numerous than ever.
With a seasoned team and after more than eight years of bootstrapping, we enter 2014 with the same irrepressible zeal to delight our growing community; to inform, to inspire, and to tell great stories. Thank you for making Mashable what it is, and we hope you’ll join us for this next chapter.
Image: Composite Mashable; iStockphoto, bezov