US-based publishing platform Medium raised $50m yesterday in a series C round that included GV, the corporate venturing unit formerly known as Google Ventures.
Spark Capital led the round, which also featured fellow venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Medium’s founder and CEO, Evan Williams. The round valued the company at $600m, a person familiar with the financing told Re/code.
Founded in 2012, Medium operates a blogging platform that in effect exists in the middle ground between microblogging platforms like Twitter and longer-form sites like WordPress.
Earlier this month, Medium released revenue earning capabilities for its users as well as a new batch of custom tools for professional publishers and bloggers, allowing them a greater degree of branding and enabling them to migrate existing blogs on to the platform more easily.
Williams said in a post on Medium yesterday: “We decided to bolster our resources now given the demand we’ve seen for the vision we are building toward.
“We are 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 have come, we have much more to do.”
The round increased Medium’s overall funding to more than $130m since it was founded, and comes after a $57m series B round in September 2015 backed by GV, digital media company Chernin Group, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Obvious Ventures that valued it at $400m.
Medium had previously raised $25m in a January 2014 series A round featuring GV, Creative Artists Agency, which participated through its CAA Ventures subsidiary, Greylock, Code Advisors, Science, Betaworks, SV Angel and various angel investors.