BuzzFeed Secures $19.3M in Funding

A year ago, BuzzFeed invested in its editorial department with a $15.5 million round of venture capital

BuzzFeed secured $19.3 million in a new round of financing on Thursday led by the investment firm New Enterprise Associates.

Earlier investors, including Hearst, SoftBank, the New York-based venture capital firm RRE and Lerer Ventures, also invested in the fourth round of venture capital funding.

In addition, BuzzFeed said that Buddy Media co-founders Michael and Kass Lazerow have joined as new investors.

“We have the senior management, board, and investors we need to build the next great media company: socially native, tech enabled, with massive scale. We are all focused on that big goal and raised this capital to move even faster,” Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed's founder and CEO, said in a statement.

BuzzFeed said it would use the capital to expand its mobile offerings, hire more reporters and videographers and expand itself geographically. Last month, the company opened its Los Angeles bureau in West Hollywood.

Before that, it hired Los Angeles Times veterans Richard Rushfield and Kate Aurthur, who most recent worked at the Daily Beast, to run the West Coast outpost.

In December, the company passed 40 million unique monthly visitors, according to internal Google Analytics numbers.

A year ago, BuzzFeed secured a $15.5 million round of funding to invest in its editorial team. With that money, it hired Politico veteran Ben Smith as its first editor-in-chief and quickly expanded its team of reporters and editors. It also opened a bureau in Washington, D.C.

BuzzFeed currently has about 180 employees.

 

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