NewsCred, a media company that serves as a middle man for third party media content, has raised $15 million and added the New York Times as a prestigious partner to give its model more validity.
Founded in 2008, Newswire reinvents the newswire business model by offering media companies an easy way to syndicate premium content. Rather than offering its own content, the company acts as the middleman, working with media companies as well as brands to simplify licensing and payment arrangements. It syndicates content from more than 2,500 publishers. The company’s media clients include The Economist, Bloomberg, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, and TheNextWeb, while brands include Pepsi, GE, The Hartford, and Johnson & Johnson.
The company will focus this latest round in continuing to grow its newswire service.
The $15 million was led by the Mayfield Fund, with participation by new investor Greycroft Partners and existing investors FirstMark Capital and IA Ventures. It brings the company’s total funding to just under $20 million, including $700,000 in seed money and $4 million in Series A.
“As the leading content marketing and syndication platform, NewsCred is enabling its clients to drive exponential growth in traffic from social referrals, triple digit percentage increase in unique visitors and double digit percentage growth in email open rates,” said Rajeev Batra, Partner, Mayfield Fund. “Marketing is being disrupted by software, Big Data and the need for high quality content, which we have witnessed firsthand given our involvement with several leading marketing software companies. For marketers, content is the currency for establishing authentic relationships with their consumers.”
The profitable company has seen revenue increase 11-fold, with a 570 percent increase in new customers.
The company began in 2008 as a way to offer publishers supplemental content, but began publishing content on the websites of brands due to high demand. It does not offer advertised content, but rather non-branded content to help supplement the advertising. The addition of the New York Times helps add legitimacy to its pioneering model.
“We have a huge market opportunity in front of us,” Shafqat Islam, NewsCred’s CEO, explained in a blog post. “We will execute with speed and discipline, run faster than the fastest competitor, and reward and celebrate the incredible people who help us achieve our goals. But through it all, we remain steadfastly committed to helping the news industry not just survive, but to thrive. And that is certainly worth fighting for.”