Goop
Venture Round in 2019
Goop Inc. is a lifestyle brand that operates an online platform focused on wellness, curated shopping, and lifestyle content. Founded in 2008 by Gwyneth Paltrow, Goop originated as a weekly newsletter but has since evolved into a comprehensive lifestyle site. It offers a carefully curated selection of products, including apparel, beauty items, wellness products, and home goods. The platform also provides valuable content, featuring expert advice on health, fitness, and mental well-being, along with travel recommendations, cooking recipes, and design ideas. Goop aims to serve as a trusted resource for readers, presenting insights and suggestions in a personalized manner rather than through anonymous sources. The brand emphasizes clean beauty and wellness, exemplified by its exclusive skincare line, Goop by Juice Beauty, which aligns with its commitment to quality and holistic living. Based in New York, Goop continues to expand its offerings while maintaining a focus on authenticity and expert-driven content.
The Dodo is a digital media company based in New York that focuses on animals, providing a blend of news, entertainment, and advocacy. It aims to be the leading online community for animal lovers, offering engaging stories and videos that highlight animal-related issues and promote animal activism. The Dodo also facilitates connections between its audience and animal welfare initiatives, encouraging care and awareness for various species. Through its content, the company seeks to inspire and inform individuals about the importance of animal welfare and the natural world.
Inverse
Seed Round in 2015
Inverse is an online media platform focused on curating content for a millennial male audience. It specializes in original reporting, news coverage, and insightful analysis, exploring emerging ideas, new technologies, and trends. By highlighting the perspectives of innovative thinkers and creators, Inverse seeks to engage its audience with unique insights into pop culture and everyday life. The platform aims to answer the question of what the future may hold, fostering a sense of curiosity and encouraging its readers to better understand and prepare for upcoming developments.
The Dodo is a digital media company based in New York that focuses on animals, providing a blend of news, entertainment, and advocacy. It aims to be the leading online community for animal lovers, offering engaging stories and videos that highlight animal-related issues and promote animal activism. The Dodo also facilitates connections between its audience and animal welfare initiatives, encouraging care and awareness for various species. Through its content, the company seeks to inspire and inform individuals about the importance of animal welfare and the natural world.
Elite Daily
Convertible Note in 2014
Elite Daily, Inc. is an online media platform focused on providing engaging content tailored for millennials, particularly Generation Y. Founded in 2014 and based in New York, the company produces a wide range of articles, videos, and documentaries across various categories, including news, lifestyle, dating, entertainment, politics, and culture. Elite Daily aims to deliver content that resonates with the interests and perspectives of its audience, which exceeds 70 million monthly readers, establishing it as a significant community for millennial voices. The platform was created by a team of media professionals from the same demographic, who sought to move away from traditional media's often monotonous presentation of news and instead foster a vibrant, socially driven environment. As of 2017, Elite Daily operates as a subsidiary of Bustle Digital Group.
The Dodo
Seed Round in 2014
The Dodo is a digital media company based in New York that focuses on animals, providing a blend of news, entertainment, and advocacy. It aims to be the leading online community for animal lovers, offering engaging stories and videos that highlight animal-related issues and promote animal activism. The Dodo also facilitates connections between its audience and animal welfare initiatives, encouraging care and awareness for various species. Through its content, the company seeks to inspire and inform individuals about the importance of animal welfare and the natural world.
**Sulia is a subject-based social network that connects you to the top social sources on subjects you care about.**
We all have interests that we're extremely passionate about. Whether it's our family, a sports team, breaking news, Hollywood gossip, a hobby, a career, or a political issue, we obsess over our interests everyday.
However, with an endless number of sources talking about an endless number of subjects, it's nearly impossible to find the best sources to follow to across your interests. And, even if you were able to identify the top sources, sifting through all of their content is maddeningly time-consuming.
We built Sulia to address these problems (which were driving us mad too).
Sulia’s subject-based structure of social channels connects trusted sources and enthusiasts on shared interests across thousands of subjects, including breaking news and events. How?
We use a combination of network managers and sophisticated algorithms to identify the best-regarded sources across thousands of subjects. We then dynamically filter content from those sources, regardless of where it's created (a blog, a social network, a media site, through Sulia's publishing system, etc.), into high-quality, realtime social channels. The result is streams of timely content from trusted sources that is always on-topic, readable, and relevant.
People use Sulia everyday to discover new sources and engage with their interests.
Sulia is backed by leading media and technology investors, including:
-- Firstmark Capital: Rick Heitzmann
-- Village Ventures: Matt Harris, Bo Peabody
-- IA Capital Partners: Roger Ehrenberg
-- Founder Collective: Chris Dixon
-- SV Angels: Ron Conway
-- Mark Gerson, Founder, Gerson Lehrman Group
9GAG, Inc. is an online platform and social media website that specializes in user-generated content, primarily focused on humor. Founded in 2008 and based in Mountain View, California, the company allows users to post and comment on a wide array of entertaining media, including funny pictures, videos, memes, and various categories such as gaming, anime, movies, and sports. The site features daily updates of user-generated videos encompassing themes like comedy, pranks, and cute moments, creating an engaging environment for users to connect and share their interests. Through its vibrant community, 9GAG fosters conversation and interaction among its users, making it a popular destination for humor and entertainment on the Internet.
Babble is an online magazine and community platform that caters to urban parents and hipsters, offering a wide range of lifestyle content. Founded in December 2006 by Alisa Volkman and Rufus Griscom and based in New York, the platform includes articles, photos, videos, and blogs covering topics such as beauty, home, food, travel, entertainment, and parenting. Babble also features community engagement through profiles, message boards, and photo-sharing services. Notable sections include 'Strollerderby,' a parenting blog, and 'Parental Advisory,' an advice column that addresses various aspects of modern parenting and lifestyle trends.
Babble is an online magazine and community platform that caters to urban parents and hipsters, offering a wide range of lifestyle content. Founded in December 2006 by Alisa Volkman and Rufus Griscom and based in New York, the platform includes articles, photos, videos, and blogs covering topics such as beauty, home, food, travel, entertainment, and parenting. Babble also features community engagement through profiles, message boards, and photo-sharing services. Notable sections include 'Strollerderby,' a parenting blog, and 'Parental Advisory,' an advice column that addresses various aspects of modern parenting and lifestyle trends.
Crowd Fusion
Series A in 2008
Crowd Fusion (now Ceros) is a publishing platform that combines the best of several popular applications like blogging, wikis, tagging and workflow management into a powerful open source framework in order to enable rapid deployment of new features and to solve the pain points of publishing vertical destination sites at scale.
Founded in 2007 by CEO Brian Alvey (former co-founder of Weblogs, Inc) and CTO Craig Wood, Crowd Fusion raised $3 million from Velocity Interactive Group, Greycroft Partners and Marc Andreessen in July of 2008. Velocity's Jon Miller and Greycroft's Ian Sigalow joined the company's board of directors. When Miller left Velocity to become the CEO of Digital Media at Newscorp, Velocity changed its name to Fuse Capital and Fuse's Mickie Rosen joined the board.
In September of 2008, Crowd Fusion launched its first showcase site, Obsessable, covering consumer electronics. In December of 2008, Crowd Fusion launched another showcase site, Super Eco, covering green news.
In 2009, Crowd Fusion has explored working with other publishers to conquer various verticals like sports, finance, food, fashion, music, health, cars, entertainment and parenting, while using the showcase sites as a testing ground to further plan and develop the Crowd Fusion platform.
Ceros acquired by Crowd Fusion and changed name to Ceros.
HuffPost is an online news provider and blog that covers politics, entertainment, style, world news, technology, and comedy, operating as a large online media network of contributors. The platform offers localized and international information on socio-economic, cultural, political, lifestyle, and entertainment topics, supported by photos and videos. Launched in 2005 and based in New York, HuffPost has grown into a widely read digital outlet and became the first commercially run United States digital media enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
HuffPost is an online news provider and blog that covers politics, entertainment, style, world news, technology, and comedy, operating as a large online media network of contributors. The platform offers localized and international information on socio-economic, cultural, political, lifestyle, and entertainment topics, supported by photos and videos. Launched in 2005 and based in New York, HuffPost has grown into a widely read digital outlet and became the first commercially run United States digital media enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.