NewsCred, the world’s leading content marketing platform, owned by two Bangladeshi nationals, on Friday announced its $25m Series C funding led by InterWest Partners.
With this investment, NewsCred will aggressively scale global operations with a focus on sales, technology and product development. Additionally, Doug Pepper of InterWest Partners has joined NewsCred’s board of directors.
In 2013, NewsCred's customer base tripled and revenue increased 400%. The company experienced tremendous demand from global Fortune 500 clients such as Procter & Gamble, Capgemini, Blue Cross Blue Shield, General Electric, Xerox, Visa, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, The Hearst Corporation, Time Inc and more. NewsCred now employs over 120 people in New York, London and Dhaka.
With the launch of the Content Marketing Cloud in 2013, NewsCred became the first company to offer an end-to-end SaaS platform for content workflow, sourcing, recommendations, publishing, distribution and analytics. Through the platform, brands gain unprecedented access to the largest content marketplace in the world – millions of licensed articles, images and video from over 4,500 publishers, ranging from the New York Times and Reuters to Getty Images and Billboard.
Additionally, in 2013, NewsCred launched The NewsRoom, an exclusive freelance network that enables brands to commission the highest quality journalists, photographers, digital artists and videographers.
“Consumers expect hyper-relevant content, 24/7, wherever they are. Marketers need to meet that relentless demand by creating engaging content with simplicity, speed and scale. To deliver against this need, we've built the first end-to-end content marketing solution,” said Shafqat Islam, CEO and Co-founder of NewsCred. “By combining cutting-edge software and quality content, we've created a platform that changes the game for marketers. Today’s funding is the latest support for our vision and leadership in this increasingly complex industry. We’re thrilled to have InterWest Partners on board and Doug’s expert guidance in this next chapter.”
“In NewsCred, InterWest sees an opportunity in the $44B content marketing space that is comparable to what we saw with companies like Marketo, Optimizely and Spredfast,” said Doug Pepper, General Partner at InterWest Partners. “By any metric – number of customers, revenue and mindshare – NewsCred is the definitive leader in an important new software category, driven by product innovation and thought leadership.”
This funding round was led by InterWest Partners with participation from existing investors, including Mayfield Fund, FirstMark Capital and IA Ventures. NewsCred raised a $15M round in March 2013 for a total of $20M in previous funding.