The archive · Consumer Apps · Financial decision · 2015
Medium raised $57M to bet it could become publishing's dominant quality pipeline
Medium raised a $57M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz on 2015-09-28 — $82M total — to become the dominant pipeline for quality content and conversation.
Medium
What the business is
An open publishing platform where anyone can write; Medium also seeded quality by hiring its own journalists and running its own mini-publications while courting top-tier publishers.
How it started
Medium was Ev Williams' return to publishing after he sold Blogger, via Pyra Labs, to Google in 2003. Greylock had led the Series A; by the Series B the platform had raised $82M in total, with Ev Williams still its majority shareholder.
What happened
On 2015-09-28 Medium's head of operations, Andy Doyle, announced $57M in new capital, led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz with significant participation from Google Ventures and Greylock, plus Obvious Ventures, The Chernin Group and Series A angels. Doyle said the money would let Medium run 'heads down' toward its vision of being 'the dominant pipeline for connecting quality content and conversation.' The company had experimented with hiring its own journalists and starting mini-publications, but no top-tier publication had moved over; it scheduled an October 7 event to announce new features and partnerships at a moment when Facebook's Instant Articles push and a reported Google equivalent were courting the same publishers.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Medium was Ev Williams' second act in publishing: after selling Blogger (via Pyra Labs) to Google in 2003, he built an open platform where anyone could write, with the company curating and seeding quality rather than chasing clicks. By September 2015 Medium had raised $82M in total — a Series A led by Greylock and a new Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz — and Williams remained majority shareholder.
The $57M Series B was announced on 2015-09-28 by head of operations Andy Doyle, with Google Ventures, Greylock, Obvious Ventures, The Chernin Group and Series A angels participating. Doyle said the money would allow Medium to 'continue, heads down, running hard to fully realize our vision' of becoming 'the dominant pipeline for connecting quality content and conversation.' TechCrunch noted the company had toyed with models — hiring its own journalists, starting its own mini-publications — but that no top-tier publication had up and moved to Medium yet.
The timing was a platform war: Facebook had launched its Instant Articles push in May 2015 and Google was reported to be trying its own version, while Medium prepared an October 7 event to announce new features and partnerships. The Hacker News thread on the round drew 122 points and 103 comments, with the debate centered on whether a funded, independent platform could actually win the distribution battle against the feed giants.
What has to be true
- Ev Williams had a track record in publishing — Blogger proved he could build a platform people wrote on, and Medium was the attempt to do it for the social era.
- The company believed quality was a distribution problem: its stated goal of being the dominant pipeline for quality content and conversation implied curation and partnerships, not just hosting.
- Facebook's Instant Articles and Google's reported equivalent were moving to own publishers, making the race urgent and the Series B a funding-arms-race move.
- No top-tier publication had yet moved to Medium, so the capital was a bet on features and partnerships to come — announced for October 7 — rather than on proven migration.
What can be applied
Raising against platform giants works only if distribution follows; a publishing bet lives or dies on whether top writers and publications actually move, not on how much capital the company holds.
Aftermath
As of 2015-09-28 Medium had just announced a $57M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz — $82M raised in total — and was preparing an October 7 event to announce new features and partnerships. The platform ran its own publications and journalists while courting outside writers and top-tier publishers; TechCrunch's report records no later milestone than that announcement.
Sources
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