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| Digital magazine app Flipboard has raised another $50m in funding |
Flipboard, the digital magazine app, has raised another $50m (£31m) in funding from investors, valuing the Silicon Valley company at $800m.
The investment will be used to finance greater international expansion, finalise a Windows 8 app, and allow the company to hire more sales staff, Mike McCue, Flipboard's chief executive and co-founder, told technology blog TechCrunch.
The funding round was led by investors including Rizvi Traverse Management, which led a funding round attempt to take PlayBoy Enterprises private, and Goldman Sachs, with existing investors Insight Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participating, marking it as the latest sign of investors' appetite for novel Silicon Valley-based content distribution platforms such as the Material, Zite and Pulse apps.
Flipboard first launched in July 2010 as an iPad app with an interesting new spin on news aggregation, which turned people's Twitter and Facebook feeds into a digital magazine, later launching on the iPhone and Android.
Version 2.0 of the Flipboard app was then launched in March as the company's "largest release we've ever done", McCue told the Guardian at the time, allowing users to curate and share their own digital magazines within the app, hoping to add to its existing 50m-strong user base.
Fliboard's user base now totals about 85m users, according to McCue, with more than 2 million user-created magazines now available via the Flipboard apps and website.
The recent funding round comes after an initial investment of $10.5m, and a second round of funding totalling $50m in April 2011, which previously valued Flipboard at $200m.
Flipboard is adding at least 200,000 new users a day with "sometimes 250,000 or 300,000" users, McCue told TechCrunch. “We have some of the world’s best brands advertising on Flipboard, such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton.”
“When you tap on the ad, it will take you to a brand magazine. With version 2.0, these brands are curating magazines. [We are] generating revenue for all of our publisher partners,” McCue added.
Credit: Samuel Gibbs
Source: The Guardian
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