We can today announce that we have raised $1.1 million in seed funding, and we’re opening shop in New York City.
The investment will be used to further our mission of helping media professionals and consumers find the world’s most engaging stories each day. We will continue to develop Spike, which is now used by dozens of newsrooms to stay ahead of the curve on trending news. We will also be updating NewsWhip.com, and our Android and iPhone Apps.
Spike Platform will remain main focus
Our bigger mission at NewsWhip is to use the wisdom of the crowd – i.e. the billion people who share content on Facebook and Twitter – to find the best stuff on the web each day.
Currently, Spike will remain our main commercial focus. With it, we’ve built a story-finding tool that makes life much easier every day for hundreds of journalists, editors, producers, and marketers. We see a much bigger market for what it does opening up over the next couple of years as brand newsrooms mature and companies seek greater real time relevance.
We now have newsroom clients in 12 countries. Other Spike clients include freelancers, small publishers, agencies, and a few savvy brands focused on content marketing. Like newsrooms, brand marketers need to identify and work with quality stories – in particular, content that is driving engagement. That’s what we supply.
Hiring in New York
We’re opening an office in New York City this month, and we have started hiring a New York-based sales and communications team. We’re also planning further growth for our team in Dublin.
The investors in this round include Hal Philipp of Meridian Growth Capital and Shane Naughton of Inundata, who both contributed to a previous angel round of investment for NewsWhip. They were joined by new incoming investors, AIB Seed Capital Fund (managed by Dublin BIC), Enterprise Ireland and angel investor and entrepreneur Hannes Smarason, former CEO of Icelandair, and CBO of deCODE.
Our investors had some kind things to say:
Investor Shane Naughton of Inundata said: “The most promising aspect of NewsWhip’s Spike platform is the range of clients it has attracted. First, there are leading digital publishers – the BBC, The Huffington Post, Yahoo!, The Guardian Think Progress, The Blaze, News International. But then there’s smaller publishers, regional newspapers, PR firms, and TV and radio stations. Clients in Switzerland, Belgium, Australia and Canada. Put that range of users together and we see that Spike can become the new standard tool for all media professionals to stay ahead of trending news.”
Investor Hal Philipp of Meridian Growth Capital said: “Quite apart from helping newsrooms with their Spike tool, the NewsWhip team have built Newswhip.com into a fantastic consumer offering, one which I personally find quite indispensable to my daily routine of news scanning.”
Eugene Smyth, Investment Advisor, Dublin BIC said: “We are excited by the growth potential that NewsWhip has already shown. The publishing world is changing rapidly and is using a range of new toolsets to discover content. NewsWhip offers a piece of the pie that has been missing up to now, surfacing the fastest-breaking news on social media in real time.”
We have a fantastic team of very talented and focused individuals, and we’ve built a technology “whose time has come.” We’re very much looking forward to the coming year.
For now, we leave you with the great advice of Devo:
