Photo website Imgur is taking a major step beyond its roots as an easy way for Reddit users to share photos with a $40 million round of funding.

The investment is the first outside funding for the site, which has quietly grown into one of the largest online hosts of images and gifs. The site boasts more than 130 million unique monthly users and more than 2 billion daily pageviews.

Alan Schaaf started Imgur out of his Ohio University dorm room in 2009. The site's origin is chronicled in a now famous post on Reddit entitled: "My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think?"

The site quickly become the go-to host for Reddit users but grew beyond the site to begin generating its own traffic.

With Reddit, Schaaf found a fervent user base that helped the site grow rapidly while becoming profitable almost immediately.

"We've always been profitable from the very beginning," Schaaf told Mashable. "The only money I've ever invested personally into the service was the $7 for the initial domain name. We've always been profitable. We've always been growing. We've more or less always been able to do the things we want to do."

The site had been entirely self funded or "bootstrapped" in startup terms. However as the site grew beyond just a picture host for Reddit, so did the opportunities.

"We want to be a household name for self expression and viral images on the Internet," said Matt Strader, chief operating office of Imgur.

The money will be primarily used to hire engineers with particular attention to its mobile development, as well as to build a sales team and add infrastructure investments such as a larger office.

"Over time our ambitions have gotten bigger and now we have a vision that includes global Internet domination," he said. "In order to achieve that, we just need to be bigger and better all around and that's just going to take more money and more experience."

Schaaf declined to disclose the valuation of the company but did say that the site is still majority owned by its founders.

Imgur's revenue is driven by advertising including banner ads, sponsored images, an API for developers and an analytics service for sites that want to know more about the traffic a picture generates.

Taking money wasn't easy, Schaaf said. The company had met with a variety of investors before settling on Andreessen Horowitz, which will add Lars Dalgaard, a general partner at the firm and an executive with software company SAP, to Imgur's board.

"I would say it was a pretty hard decision," Schaaf said. "It took us five years to make it."

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