Publishing platform Medium raises funding from Greylock

Investment, which also came from angel investors, reportedly worth $25 million

It looks like Biz Stone is not the only ex-Twitterer who is getting funding for his dream project.

Medium, the  publishing startup that was created by Twitter co-founder, and former CEO, Evan Williams, has just raised its first round of outside funding, it was announced on Tuesday.

The round was led by David Sze and Josh Elman of Greylock Partners, with participation from angel investors and "friends of Medium." Until now, all funding for Medium came primarly out of Williams' own pocket.

"As an investor, I’d be happy to continue to do so. As CEO, my aim is to maximize Medium’s chances for success," he wrote. "Expanding our network and having partners to lean on is a useful way to do that."

As for the size of the round, Williams did not reveal that, though a report out from ReCode has the amount at $25 million. VatorNew has reached out to both Elman and Sze to confirm the size of the investment, and we will update if we learn more.

Medium, which was first announced in August of 2012, is a publishing platform that organizes posts into collections with a theme and a template, such as This Happened To Me, which is a collection of crazy stories, or When I Was a Kid, which features pictures of users as children.

"Almost two years ago, we started an exploratory project at The Obvious Corporation to figure out what a publishing platform built from scratch for today’s world would look like," Williams said. "A platform that was open to everyone, as simple as possible, encouraged collaboration, and helped the best ideas and stories rise to the top."

Elman and Sze, who are both joining the board of directors at Medium, wrote their own blog post, in which they touched on why they found Medium to be a good investment.

"We believe there is a significant opportunity to create new platforms for publishing and reading that are open to anyone. Media is still in the midst of a massive shift from print to digital," they said.

While the launch of Blogger was the first to allow people to publish their thoughts, there is still a lot of room for improvement, including how users can discover worthwhile reading material.

"Social platforms like Twitter have become great networks for sharing and routing articles, but have led to focusing on the most recent content or most clicked headlines instead of always the best content or deeper analysis," they said.

Medium, on the other hand, allows people to find out what is popular and trending, not just what is new and being read by their friends.

"We believe Medium can become the default place for publishing and discovering stories of all kinds."

Elman, who spent nearly two years as a Product Manager at Twitter, is also deeply involved with Biz Stone's new project, Jelly. That company just raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding, also led by Greylock, and Elman joined the board of directors at that company as well.

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